Twelfth Night in Central Park

This is the second production of Twelfth Night I've seen this year (you can find my review of a production at the McCarter Theater in Princeton dated March 11 on this blog). I mentioned that it's my favorite of Shakespeare's play, and it's tricky to direct because it's a screwball comedy that is haunted by the spectre of death. I've seen at least five productions of this play over the years, and the one I saw this week at the Delacorte Theater in New York's Central Park is the best. Daniel Sullivan, the director, strikes just the right balance between the giddy romantic comedy the melancholy meditations on loss.

To recap briefly, Twelfth Night concerns twins, Viola and Sebastian, who are separated in a shipwreck and believe each other drowned. They come to shore in Illyria, where the Duke Orsino loves Olivia, who will not entertain suitors because she is grieving for her dead brother. Olivia's uncle, the drunkard Toby Belch, is host to a foppish friend, Andrew Aguecheek, which annoys her Puritan steward Malvolio. Viola, out of concern for her safety, poses as a man and goes to work for Orsino, whom she is attracted to. He sends to her Olivia to press his suit, but Olivia ends up falling for Viola, whom she believes to be a man.

Sullivan, along with costume designer Jane Greenwood and set designer John Lee Beatty, have created a verdant world of comic delight. The set is a series of grassy knolls, and characters slide down them like children (the set is also convincing enough to confuse local wildlife--a raccoon has made a home there, and I saw it make a quick entrance and exit, but it did not appear at the curtain call). The production is also very musical, with a Celtic flavor. Many of the characters sing, and quite well.

The draw of this production is film star Anne Hathaway as Viola, and even from my seat in Row U she lights up the stage with star power. I thought she was a little too nimble with the language, rushing through the "Fortune forbid my outside hath not charmed her," speech, but those quibbles aside she was very assured in her Shakespearean debut.

Hathaway is surrounded by an able cast. Audra McDonald, a mult-Tony winning musical performer, makes a more robust than usual Olivia, but hits many comic notes (upon seeing Viola and her twin brother on stage at the same time, she gets big laughs saying "Most wonderful!"). Raul Esparza makes Orsino terrifically moony, and David Pittu was a crowd-pleaser as the fool Feste, who of course is the most sensible character in the play.

As for the clowns, there is a great assemblage here. Jay O. Sanders nails Toby Belch, and Hamish Linklater is terrifically physical as Andrew. This part is hard to mess up, and any actor would probably give his eye teeth to play him, but Linklater goes the extra mile, tossing himself around the stage like a rag doll. I also appreciated that Sullivan allowed a beat following his line, "I was adored once" to remind us that even this silly character has his pathos. Julie White makes a vivacious Maria, Olivia's lady in waiting.

Michael Cumpsty, who I've seen many times in Public Theater productions, is a marvelous Malvolio. One of the highlights of any production of Twelfth Night is the scene in which he reads a letter, written by Maria and purporting to be in Olivia's hand, declaring her love for him. It can make for low comedy, as the clowns spy on the preening steward as he convinces himself that Olivia loves him. At the McCarter Theater in March, the scene was like something out of a bedroom farce, with characters moving around the stage. In this production, Malvolio stands in one spot, and the clowns hide in a tree. It's a much more static approach to the scene, but worked well I think because it properly focuses on Malvolio's vanity, and ultimately his downfall.