Twelfth Night

Twelfth Night is my favorite of Shakespeare's plays. It is a deliriously funny comedy that is infused with melancholy. It is a giddy waltz of lovers, but also contains one of the most vicious practical jokes in all of literature. It is a debate between hedonism and Puritanism, but in the end both sides are cast out of the play.

Last night I saw the McCarter Theater's production of the play, directed by Rebecca Taichman. On the whole, I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I have definite ideas about how this play should be mounted so have some idiosyncratic differences with her approach. As with many productions that I've seen, Taichman hits the melancholy a little too hard. I agree with Harold Bloom, who writes in his book that the play should be as fast-paced as possible. In some ways it's a Marx Brothers movie before there was a Marx Brother. Yes, death is a constant topic throughout the text, but it should play second fiddle to the play's wacky love matches.

The plot concerns twins who are washed up on shore in the country of Illyria, each believing the other has drowned. Viola masquerades as a man (don't ask) and gains employment with Duke Orsino, who pines for the Countess Olivia, who won't see him because she is in mourning for her brother. In Olivia's household is her bluenosed steward, Malvolio, who is constantly at odds with her drunken uncle, Sir Toby Belch, and his foppish friend, Sir Andrew Aguecheek (who is also courting Olivia). When Viola, in the guise of Cesario, the Duke's courtier, entreats Olivia to love her master, Olivia instead falls for Cesario, not realizing she's in love with a woman. Meawhile Sebastian is alive, and his eventual arrival creates mistaken identity hijinks that Shakespeare previously used in The Comedy of Errors.

Shakespeare has created a world unto itself, peopled by characters who are flirting with madness. Characters are so gripped by love that it makes them loopy, and Taichman hits on this quite well. The motif for this production is rose petals, which flutter to the stage whenever a character succumbs to love. She also uses color quite effectively, as Veanne Cox, as Olivia, goes from wearing mourning black to an ever-changing series of bright-hued gowns in the second act. The only character who is sane is of course the fool, Feste, who after characters have been either matched together or banished, closes the evening with his wistful song, The Wind and the Rain. This is one of the examples where the evening is too lugubrious, as the music written for this song by Martin Desjardins makes the song sound like a dirge.

The actors are all a joy. Rebecca Brooksher makes a spirited Viola/Cesario, and she even goes the extra mile by proving to the Duke that she is a woman (and to the audience as well) which is not a new interpretation but certainly a surprising one. Stephen DeRosa is a terrific Feste (with a wonderful singing voice) and Ted van Griethuysen steals the show as Malvolio (the play has at times been retitled Malvolio). The scene in which he is tricked into thinking Olivia loves him is a tour de force, and was greeted with enthusiastic applause.

As the comic relief, the performers are all fine, especially Tom Story as Aguecheek, but some of the action rubbed me a little wrong. I've seen dozens of Shakespearean productions, and many of them take the opportunity to overemphasize the bawdiness of the text, which I find to be a way of trying to allow the audience to understand the language. Yes, there's a lot of coarse behavior in Shakespeare, which was written for the groundlings, but today I find this to be a crutch used by a director who doesn't trust the audience. In much of the byplay between Toby and Aguecheek, we get the characters miming urination, masturbation and cunnilingus. It's overkill.

Very often the lovers in Twelfth Night, other than Viola, suffer from comparison to the clowns, but Cox is an exception. She is probably too old for the part, but makes a wonderful transition from debilitating grief to goofy infatuation. I will forever remember her role on a Seinfeld episode where she plays a woman who heckles Jerry and her pinky toe is severed in a car accident, and flashing back to Seinfeld during Twelfth Night is not a bad thing. Christopher Innvar is properly moony as Orsino (he opens the play with the memorable line, "If music be the food of love, play on") and Kevin Isola is fine as Sebastian, even if he doesn't look like Brooksher (the implication of them being identical twins and wearing the same costumes is enough).