Review: American Shakespeare Center twists Twelfth Night, Shakespeare’s already complex comedy

We think of Shakespeare as a romantic. He was anything but. As portrayed in the canon, love is an affliction, which clouds the reason and destroys discrimination and judgment. If we take a cold look at his great romance, Romeo and Juliet, we see it for what it is. Juliet is a 13-year-old girl who seizes upon Romeo desperately to escape a forced marriage to the execrable Paris, and Romeo’s passion for Juliet is not different from his passion for Rosalind, who was the love of his life the month previous. But Shakespearian cynicism is everywhere. In Midsummer’s Night Dream love – even the love of a fairy queen for an ass – comes about as a result of the strategic application of fairy dust. In the Country-Western version, bourbon would be an acceptable substitute.

But what about a play where a woman, disguised as a man, is sent by the man she secretly loves to court another woman, who disdains the man but falls in love with the woman disguised as a man so deeply that when she comes across the woman’s brother, who is an actual man, she marries him, thinking he is the woman disguised as a man? And when the woman disguised as a man reveals that she is a woman, the man who sent her (thinking she was a man) to court the other woman, now realizing that the man is a woman, falls in love with her? And so it is with Twelfth Night, the bard’s most explicit story of gender confusion.

More Twelfth Night production photos coming soon.

In ASC’s stripped-down production, Viola (Mia Wurgaft; in some live productions Viola is played by Zoe Speas), washed onto the shores of Illyria after a shipwreck, sensibly decides to disguise herself as a boy in order to find a place in the Court of the local Count, Orsino (Brandon Carter).  Orsino appears to have one objective in life: to win the hand of his neighbor, the Lady Olivia (Constance Swain), who is ostensibly in mourning for her brother and would rather gargle with razor blades than return Orsino’s suit. So, naturally, Orsino sends the regendered Viola, who has renamed herself Cesario, to press his case. Though she cares not one whit for Orsino, it appears that “Cesario” is exactly what Olivia has in mind.

Love, real and imagined, requited and frustrated, sweeps over the characters like a tsunami. Viola loves Orsino, who loves Olivia, who loves Viola, who she imagines is Cesario. Olivia’s drunk uncle, Sir Toby Belch (John Harrell), aspires to marry Olivia off to his ridiculous companion, Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Topher Embrey), in order to access his trust fund. Olivia’s servant, Maria (Sarah Suzuki), against all odds, loves Sir Toby. And Viola’s brother Sebastian (Speas; in other productions, Wurgaft) discovers love with Olivia, which has been set up for him, unbeknownst to any of them, by his sister.

There is also Olivia’s officious majordomo, Malvolio (Michael Manocchio), who like his boss despises the disorder (including another booze-loving friend, Fabian [Matthew Radford Davies]) Sir Toby has brought into the house, and dreams of doing something about it – specifically, marrying the Lady Olivia and then having the unfettered run of the place. Maria knows it, and thus the the seeds of overthrow are planted in her mind. She forges a note in Olivia’s hand which suggests that she would love Malvolio, but only if he would wear yellow stockings and cross-garters (a style Maria knows Olivia despises) and smile (not a good look for Malvolio). She succeeds beyond her wildest dreams: Malvolio eventually appears in all that, with his face painted as pale as a full Moon and an enormous wig, grinning like a hyena in heat. He looks like a cross between a Restoration Comedy character and the evil clown in “It”. (Kudos to the uncredited makeup team).

I hope I don’t have to send out a spoiler alert before telling you that things end up happily for the good guys, if you don’t look too closely. Viola and Sebastian seem physically identical, but they are entirely different personalities. Sebastian is full of the masculine virtues of the time; he is fierce, loyal, energetic, bold, and if you mess with him he will whup you upside the head. Viola is cautious, almost timid; she is decidedly heterosexual, and Olivia’s advances terrify her. When Olivia sees Sebastian for the first time she pounces on him and that is just fine with Sebastian. When she discovers that the “Cesario” she loved is the sister of Sebastian, who she just married (Sebastian says “you were mistook, madame”) she is less embarrassed than she might be if she had worn last year’s dress to this year’s party. Sebastian; Cesario; it is all and one to her. Orsino, having spent the previous ninety minutes courting Olivia, turns to the embrace of Viola, who he thought was a boy five minutes previous. (Interestingly, he proclaims her “my mistress”, not “my wife”.)

You can easily see the problems this play presents. In most productions, Viola is played by a woman and Sebastian by a man, and to believe that anyone could mistake one for the other would require not just a suspension of disbelief but its entire annihilation. By having the two roles played by women who resemble each other (a coin toss at the beginning of the play determines who plays Viola) ASC largely solves this problem; dressed and coiffed identically, Wurgaft’s Viola and Speas’ Sebastian really could be mistaken for each other. I imagine that this replicates the experience of Shakespeare’s audiences, in which Viola, and presumably Sebastian, were each played by young boys.

The other problem is a little more difficult to address, and involves Olivia’s personality. Malvolio describes Cesario as “not yet old enough for a man nor young enough for a boy.” Given the age in which this play was written, I would place him about 12. (In the Renaissance, fifty was a long life, and responsibilities came at an early age). What is it about Olivia that would make her fall for a 12-year-old? It is clear that her interest is carnal, not maternal. In Swain’s, and director Dan Hasse’s hands, Olivia is a bit of a screecher; whenever things don’t go her way, she makes loud and dangerous noises, much like a small child who kicks and screams when she doesn’t like the desert.

It’s a legitimate choice; seeing Olivia as someone who was spoiled from childhood but whose tools are limited to being noisy helps explain her impulsiveness and shallowness. It does affect those around her, though, imbuing the household with a miasma of anxiety. Part of this may be due to the way the production has chosen to play Olivia, but part of it is also due to the reducing plan ASC put Twelfth Night on. Generally, the production runs about 150 minutes, and is in two Acts; this show runs ninety minutes, and is in one Act. All of the vital parts of the play are intact, but the opportunities for eye-rolling and foot-stamping are not there.

This slenderizing has not affected meaning but may have affected nuance. Both Harrell as Belch and Embrey as Aguecheek give performances which are more subdued than some I’ve seen. Harrell’s Belch loves his drink and loves his song but otherwise seems businesslike; Embrey’s Aguecheek is a pretentious coward, as he should be, but he is not as over-the-top as he could be. Suzuki’s Maria seems in constant worry about her explosive mistress; that she has the chops to come up with her scheme seems a bit of a revelation. She has few chances to show how she feels about Sir Toby, but I credit Suzuki for taking advantage of every opportunity that does come up.

Malvolio has been affected, too, but in this case to the better. Manocchio’s Malvolio comes across like a middle manager brought in to install some discipline to the company, and clear away some deadwood. You instinctively hate him and fear him. The company has neither the intention nor the time to make him sympathetic; he is badly used, but, really, who cares? That was probably Shakespeare’s intention. He identified Malvolio as “a Puritan”, which at that time meant that he was an enemy of theater. When Malvolio says “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” we know he will be, but not until the overthrow of Charles I by Cromwell.

The character of Orsino is not as complicated as that of Olivia, but it has its problems as well. It appears from the text that his mind is wholly devoted to the pursuit of Olivia, but he develops an unexplained intimacy with the young “Cesario”.  Carter, and the company, solve this by making Orsino impressively un-selfconscious and un-selfaware. When he lies with his head on “Cesario’s” lap, he seems oblivious to the affect he is having on the young woman who is pretending to be a young man. It is a convincing approach to a difficult problem.

Wurgaft and Speas establish who they are gracefully and efficiently. Speas does a good job of Sebastian’s masculinity to life (as does Jessika D. Williams in a brief appearance as Sebastian’s loyal friend Antonio). Wurgaft is exceptional in making Viola thoughtful without making her a schemer. This is wonderfully difficult; Viola is prone to plotting – has to be in order to make her way through the thicket she’s in – but in other productions I’ve seen she becomes enthralled with her own ability to manipulate her circumstances. Wurgaft, and the production, resist the temptation to do that, and the production is the better for it.

Toward the end of the play Shakespeare has written a mystifying scene in which Viola and Sebastian try to identify each other by asking questions about their childhood, much in the same way that your bank’s website seeks to identify you through your secret questions. Two siblings, beloved of each other, shouldn’t need to play twenty questions in order to know each other, but that’s how Shakespeare wrote it, and Wurgaft and Speas go through the scene gamely.

Twelfth Night is, at bottom, a melancholy play, punctuated by the most melancholy jester in the canon, Feste (Chris Johnston). Feste, whose first joke is about death, is designed to bring sober truths home against a background of occasionally manic gaiety. This streamlined production is less melancholy than it could be and so Feste is too. The production highlights Johnston’s excellent musicianship and singing voice, but not the sadness behind it. He has a song which closes the play which marks the ruin of a life; generally he sings it by himself, after the company has left. Here, however, the company is on stage with him, and it seems to be just another rousing song sung at a party that never really ends.

I must tell you that I saw this production on my desktop, courtesy of Marquee TV. As professionally as this was put together, those of you who have struggled with filmed theater productions during our annus horribilis know, unfortunately, that there ain’t nothin’ like the real thing, baby. Theater, especially Shakespeare, is supposed to be loud and boisterous, and this production is (it was filmed before a live audience). Film is not, whether you watch it on your cell phone or the widest movie house screen. There is a scene in which Malvolio practices smiling, in response to the forgery he receives. I would have loved to get a good look at his face, but the camera took it in a distance shot. The funny thing is that if I was at the theater, his face would have seemed to be in closeup, even though I might have been a hundred fifty feet away.

ASC’s Twelfth Night is ninety minutes long, but the Marquee Productions clip is two hours seven, as it contains some of the fine music that ASC’s actors traditionally perform before each show.

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare, directed by Dan Hasse . Featuring Mia Wurgaft, Zoe Speas, Brandon Carter, Constance Swain, Michael Manocchio, Chris Johnston, Jessika D. Williams, John Harrel, Matthew Radford Davies, Sarah Suzuki, Topher Embrey, Danielle A. Festa, Cat M. Thomas, Sam St. Ours, and Nic Sanchez . Costume design: Victoria Depew . Fight director: Benjamin Reed . Vocal coach: Nancy Anderson . Costume shop manager: Hope Maddox . Wardrobe manager: Amber Kuennen . Technical Director: Tracie Steger Skipper . Properties Manager: Rhi Sanders . Dramaturg: Anne G. Morgan . Thomas J. Coppola is the senior stage manager . Jessica Casanova is the stage manager . Produced by the American Shakespeare Center . Reviewed by Tim Treanor.

American Shakespeare Center Safe Start 2020 Summer Season
Twelfth Night
Music: 37 minutes;  Performance: 90 minutes
Filmed version: BlkFrs LIVE on Marquee TV. Click for tickets
Live performances in Staunton, VA. Click for tickets