Twelfth Night

Author: Emma Stanford

At the end of "Twelfth Night," the lovely and self-centered Countess Olivia (Martha Newman '10) stared around the stage and gasped, "Most wonderful!" The audience at the production could have said the same, feasting on Mark Evancho's lavish and whimsical set design and a dynamic ensemble of student actors.

"Twelfth Night" is one of Shakespeare's most popular comedies because it has something for everyone: love, confusion, humiliation, music and plenty of sexual innuendo. It tells the story of Viola (Lucy Faust '09), a young girl who has been shipwrecked off the coast of Illyria, losing her twin brother Sebastian (Michael Kessler '11) to the storm. She disguises herself as a young man and becomes a page for the moony Duke Orsino (Willim Damron '09). Viola quickly falls in love with Orsino, who is vainly courting Olivia, who somewhat improbably becomes smitten with the disguised Viola. After summarizing this tangle for the audience, Viola rumples her hair and sighs, "This is too hard a knot for me t'untie." We know how she feels. In the end, Sebastian appears alive and, after some confusion and a little old-fashioned dueling, he and Olivia and Viola and Orsino pair off neatly. Added to this is a comedic subplot in which Olivia's debauched uncle, Sir Toby (Alexander Manshel '09), his friend Sir Andrew (Willy McKay '11) and the sarcastic Maria (Sheyenne Brown '09) wreak cruel revenge on Olivia's simpering steward and would-be suitor, Malvolio (Justine Katzenbach '08.5).

A particular spirit is necessary to pull off something like "Twelfth Night." Shakespeare presents his characters as broad caricatures, from the mincing coward Sir Andrew to the self-absorbed diva Olivia, and any attempt to wrench realism or empathy out of such characters would be doomed to fail. But under Assistant Professor of Theatre Alex Draper's '88 wise direction, the cast played up the comedy's exuberant energy without sweating details of realism. They mimicked the choreography and comic timing of an early TV comedy, prancing and swooning and drunkenly singing Mozart. Even the stage, vaguely reminiscent of a broken Greek column and surrounded by fantastical, glittering white trees, suggested that the characters lived in some superlative cartoon of the 1920s, free from everyday concerns to wallow in their romantic tangles.

The drunken duo of Sir Toby and Andrew was a joy to watch, whether singing and prancing around the stage or at desperate odds when Toby tried to convince the coward Andrew to take part in a duel. But the pinnacle of comic exaggeration was Malvolio. Katzenbach took the play's gender-bending antics a step further by playing a male character convincingly and hilariously. Malvolio is traditionally a foppish, overweening prude, but Katzenbach rendered him as an androgynous insect, intoning every line and teetering around the stage as if her gangly legs were moving of their own accord. The audience gleefully awaited Malvolio's every entrance, never more so than when he swayed onstage in a blaze of yellow plaid and cross garters, giddy with the illusion that Olivia was in love with him. When the histrionics of the tangled lovers became tiresome, his cartoonish exaggeration of them was a joy to watch.

In the end, realism came from an unexpected source. Amid all the scheming and deception, the fool Feste (John Glouchevitch '10.5) provided a voice of reason. He sauntered around the stage, bantering with every character, playing the drunken musician for Toby and Andrew and the witty wordsmith for Viola and Olivia. Glouchevitch provided the perfect balance of humor and practicality; for all of Feste's songs and jokes, he was primarily concerned with extracting money from the other characters. It was comforting to know that at least someone in Illyria had a more pressing concern than a manufactured love affair.

"Twelfth Night" employed a large cast of minor characters, including soldiers and sailors, and with such a strong cast of leads it was easy for the smaller roles to seem flat. At times the cast seemed polarized between cartoonish extremes of monotony and exuberance, as when Viola and Sir Andrew dueled incompetently and hilariously until several robotic soldiers intervened. But this was a trivial flaw. The Department of Theatre and Dance made Shakespeare entirely its own, and we may wait anxiously until it does it again.