Through Sun 10/30
We went to see opening night of Twelfth Night at PlayhouseSquare’s Hanna Theater and came away with the very unsurprising conclusion that Shakespeare still works after 400 years — wait for it — he wrote damn good plays, plays which attract a devoted priesthood of talented, creative actors, designers and directors, plays which skilled theater people can make work, with or without production values.
This past summer we watched two free Cleveland Shakespeare Festival productions of Richard II and The Tempest, open air shows with zero production values, and walked away completely satisfied. On the other hand, Great Lakes Theater has invested considerable resources in this production of Twelfth Night, resources which they have put to good use bringing out the nuances.
But before we discuss nuances or the creative process, bring yourself up to speed with this video, an online synopsis of Twelfth Night that’s wildly irreverent but dead on.
Watching the video, be clear on the unhappy romantic triangle in which Duke Orsino loves Countess Olivia who loves Cesario who loves Orsino. Understand why none of the beloved return the love that is offered to them. And familiarize yourself with the characters of the comic subplot, Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Maria, whose machinations become entangled with the main plot. Complicating things still further, reconcile yourself to the unlikely proposition that Viola (Cesario) and Sebastian are identical twins of opposite sex. (Thank heavens we don’t have to explain all that.)
A preshow discussion between GLT’s producing artistic director Charles Fee and director Drew Barr told us a lot about the process behind the very unusual world of this production of Twelfth Night, how one thing led to another. Barr described how he was drawn to a Gothic sense of romance, which led him to look at the drawings of Edward Gorey, which fed into the sense of nostalgia and melancholy that he was getting from Twelfth Night.
“So we ended up with a period that’s Edwardian or Victorian, which led me to think of Great Expectations and Olivia as a kind of Miss Havisham, who tries to stop her life after being jilted on her wedding day. It all ties into the sense of loss and being stuck in the past,” Barr explains, referring to Olivia mourning her brother’s death while Viola mourns the supposed death of her twin brother Sebastian.
Dickens and Gorey? Yes, we can most definitely see those influences in the costumes, especially Olivia’s mourning dress with its unmistakably Victorian skirts, train, and bustle, a voluminous dreadnaught of an ensemble that has “Gorey” written all over it in extra bold Gothic type. Most especially in Olivia’s costumes, costume designer Kim Sorensen has outdone herself, both in the boldness of conception and in the richly detailed execution of her vision. We only wish that we had a video of Christine Weber as Olivia deftly maneuvering her costume through a scene.
When it came to the set, Twelfth Night presented Barr and scenic designer Russell Metheny with another problem, for in this play Shakespeare very specifically sets scenes that go back and forth between indoors and outdoors and between the two households.
“You don’t want to be trundling scenery in and out,” Barr says, “so you need a set that can represent both.” Fee describes how Barr stages the transitions from the very beginning of the play with fluid, simultaneous, overlapping physical action, but we say you have to see it to appreciate how well it works.
Warming to their subject, Fee and Barr explain how Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night takes its name from an unruly Elizabethan festival that featured eating and drinking, a lord of misrule, and lots and lots of crossdressing. Appropriately, appetites of all kinds come into play in Twelfth Night.
“There’s a huge amount of discussion of eating and drinking,” says Fee. “The first line of the play, Duke Orsino’s call for music, lets us know that we’re in a play about appetites.”
If music be the food of love, play on!
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.
In the midst of appetite and excess, can a devoted priesthood of comic actors make this 400-year-old play funny? Can Aled Davies as greedy, gluttonous Uncle Toby, Tom Ford as Sir Andrew Aguecheeck and Laura Perrotta as Maria wring every possible laugh out of their subplot? You bet they can! Especially when Malvolio, the victim of their scheme, is played to extravagant, supercilious perfection by Lynn Robert Berg.
Representing the upper classes and higher appetites, Weber’s Olivia falls convincingly in love with Cassandra Bissell’s Cesario. “Well, let it be,” she sighs after Cesario departs. As in her Beatrice in GLT’s production of Much Ado About Nothing, Bissell creates a truly human, sympathetic character at the heart of this anarchic comedy. Juan Rivera Lebron manages to keep the clueless Orsino a plausible object of Viola’s affection.
How can Shakespeare work after 400 years? Watch Great Lakes’ Twelfth Night. They will show you.
Twelfth Night runs in repertory with My Fair Lady at the Hanna Theatre through Sat 10/30. Tickets are $13-$80. For show times, ticket purchase, and more information, go to greatlakestheater.org or phone 216-241-6000.
[Written by Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas]
[Photo by Ken Blaze]
Cleveland, OH 44115