“Twelfth Night”

Posted by Gail M. Burns - July 2011

“It is an honor to witness so much confusion.”

– Marianne Moore

This is the second Shakespearean comedy I have seen this season – in what is turning out to be a veritable Bard-Fest – in which the director has focused the production on the ensemble instead of the ostensible leading characters. If you stop and think about how Shakespeare titled his plays, the tragedies and histories all bear the title of the central character(s) – Macbeth, Richard III, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra – while most of the comedies and romances have cheerfully nebulous names – As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, The Winter’s Tale, All’s Well That Ends Well – which make it clear that no one is the star. The title of Twelfth Night was undoubtedly supposed to prep the audience for some no-holds-barred post-Christmas style merriment, but its sub-title What You Will is just a big silly shrug of the shoulders. If Shakespeare were writing it today he might call it Spring Break or Whatever.

I used the spring break analogy to try to give a modern reader some idea of the kind of reckless silliness Shakespeare intended to impart with his choice of title. I realized with horror a few years ago that many Americans now believe that the Twelve Days of Christmas come before the holiday – as in “only twelve more shopping days until Christmas!” Let us put paid to THAT shameless capitalistic idea! The Twelve Days begin on Christmas*, which is an entire season in the Christian liturgical calendar. Twelfth Night, the conclusion of that season, was, and in some places still is, celebrated with food, drink, and “revels.” It is also the end of the sovereignty of the Lord of Misrule under whose reign everything is reversed and confusion is king.

In Twelfth Night the reversals are plain – gender (Viola dresses as a boy), social status (the servant Malvolio believes he can marry a noblewoman), intellect (the Fool is the wisest person in the play) – all are turned topsy-turvy. Sir Toby Belch, the very Lord of Cakes and Ale, and his minions Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Mary/Maria, rule the roost as their masters wallow in sadly confused romantic miseries.

So the tragedies and histories are about specific people, but the comedies and romances are about the whole cast. This is an attitude well suited to the Bakerloo Theatre Project, which always works as an ensemble.

This season Bakerloo is back in the same empty storefront space loaned to them last year by Bryce Realty. While last year they used the space, the walls of which were once painted white, in all its hollow, barren glory, this year they have wrapped it in cloth and humanity, with draperies on the wall, carpets on the floor, and the audience all around the edges on three sides.

While I am sad that Bryce hasn’t been able to find a tenant for this particular space in the intervening year – it will surely be an occasion for Revels when there isn’t an empty storefront in downtown Troy! – I am glad to see Bakerloo back in the heart of the city and continuing to experiment with their performance space and juxtaposition to the audience. This is a very intimate setting, and director William Addis has his actors draw the audience members in as co-conspirators in the tomfoolery without forcing an uncomfortable mingling of the real world and the stage.

The surviving script for Twelfth Night contains the lyrics to more songs than any other Shakespearean play. Most Elizabethan plays contained a lot of music, but often nothing remains to us but the lyrics, if that. Here Addis has incorporated both music by contemporary artists – such as Dar Williams and The Two Man Gentlemen Band – with evocative new settings of Shakespeare’s lyrics written expressly for this production by Adam Mathias. Mathias, who has worked with Bakerloo for many years, recently won a Drama Desk Award for his book for See Rock City and Other Destinations – an earlier version of which was performed in 2008 at the Barrington Stage Company Musical Theatre Lab – beating out the uber-popular Book of Mormon for the honor. Patrick Shaw, who plays Malvolio, also has a composition featured, and he and other cast members play the guitar and other instruments in Twelfth Night.

Live music and wonderful lead vocals by Becca Landis, who plays Viola, and Lauren Diesch, who plays Feste, make this a musically memorable production. (I refer you to the informative press release the company compiled focusing on the creation and performance of the music.)

If you have not seen a Bakerloo production before – and by this, their 12th season in the capital region, I would hope most of you have checked them out at least once – I quote from their Mission Statement: “Bakerloo produces high-quality, low-cost, innovative theatre that shuns pretense.” Loyal GailSez readers know, I love a theatre company that clearly knows and lives up to its mission – trying to be all things to all people is always a recipe for disaster. I have also come to the conclusion that thing I hate most in a theatre company is pretense. Pretense is not the same as having the fiscal and physical resources to have a beautiful performance space and handsome sets and costumes. Pretense is acting like having those resources means everything you produce is better theatre.

Bakerloo is living proof that excellent, entertaining theatre can be created without lavish trappings, but also that working with less doesn’t mean working with less care. The costumes for this production are basic, but carefully thought out. At the opening of Twelfth Night Olivia (Lily Junker) is in mourning, and so is often costumed all in black. Here Junker wears a lovely iridescent velvet gown for most of the evening, but at the opening of the play she goes to a coat rack and lovingly touches and smells a man’s military jacket. Clearly, the coat had belonged to her deceased father or brother. She dons it, and a pair of overly large military boots and wears them as her mourning clothes. It reminded me of when my father took a job far from home when I was six and I religiously wore his fedora to school and play, despite the ridicule of my peers.

Another lovely costume touch are the perpetually popping blue suspenders on Sir Andrew (Parag S. Gohel). I swear he could release them on cue, but I know that was not the case. Still as he charged around performing wild slapstick comedy, the clasps would pop open, sending one suspender or the other flying into the air and Gohel always reacted perfectly and built the accident into whatever he happened to be doing, which added greatly to the hilarity.

I really enjoyed the comedy of Gohel, Charlie Brown as Sir Toby, and their frequent accomplices in mischief – Diesch and Jillian Leigh Rorrer as Mary/Maria** These ladies are also cleverly though simply costumed. Mary/Maria is reimagined in “sexy secretary” garb, and Feste goes barefoot and wears an over-sized tailcoat out of which she pulls various accoutrements, including an ooo-gah horn, rendering her a sort of cross between Groucho and Harpo Marx (although Shakespeare never wrote a mute role!)

The role of Feste is the heart and soul of Twelfth Night, and Shakespeare has him play the fool at both Olivia and Orsino’s courts during the course of the play, Diesch is well up to the daunting task and not only plays an engaging fool but slides effortlessly between song and the spoken word. Addis and Diesch have imagined Feste as a genderless character, neither man nor woman but pure human wit.

Brown plays Sir Toby with a masculine authority that I enjoyed, while Gohel’s Sir Andrew is all foolish fluttering. Rorrer’s Mary/Maria is smart as a whip and full of sass. It is no wonder she easily outwits Shaw’s hilariously rigid Malvolio. Early one he moves as if his joints need oiling. (They are lubricated by misguided love later in the play.) With his close cropped hair Shaw is the spitting image of the cartoon character Doug. His slender frame is made to look even narrower by the addition of a oversized vest, and enormous round eyeglasses make his head look smaller and rounder than it really is. Shaw intrigues me – he is the author of the award-winning Hamlettes and the new musical Unville Brazil, both of which have had productions in New York City – and I am sorry I will miss the world premiere workshop presentation of his play The Autobiography of a Sparrow later in the Bakerloo season (dates and times TBA).

I had only one big problem with Addis’s staging. Possibly under the assumption that everyone knows the plot of “Twelfth Night” he does not open the show with a physical rendering of the shipwreck that separates the twins Sebastian and Viola. There was some very nice music about natural and nautical disasters, but you didn’t see what happened. Since Bakerloo has as part of its mission the introduction of the classics to new generation of audiences they need to assume that their audiences know nothing and to offer as clear an explanation of the necessary plot points as is artistically viable in any given production. If we never see the twins torn asunder, how can we rejoice when they are reunited? And since Sebastian and Viola are never played by twins (twins of opposite gender cannot be identical anyway) the two actors don’t look enough alike to make it clear to the audience that Viola, as Cesario, has a doppelganger running around Illyria until they finally come face to face. It is also confusing that Addis has the same actor – Peter Martin – play both the sea captain who Viola meets in the first scene, and her twin.

Sebastian is not much of a role and Shakespeare has him and his side-kick Antonio (Aaron Jefferson Tindall) pop in for brief scenes just often enough that we remember they exist and to set them on their inevitable course towards the reunion with Viola. Even though we don’t get to see Viola separated from her brother, that loss informs Landis’ entire melancholy performance. Her brother is gone, she is alone in the world pretending to be something and someone she is not and because of that her love for Orsino (Adam Thomas Smith) must go unrequited, while the amorous advances of Olivia terrify her…

Some productions of Twelfth Night play much more heavily than this one does on the bi-curious aspect of the script. As the Lord of Misrule continues his role reversal, Orsino is discomfited to realize that he is falling in love with another man, and Olivia is blissfully unaware that she is courting another woman. Viola asserted her heterosexuality throughout, but doesn’t bat an eyelash at hooking up with a guy who apparently had the hots for a young man, and Olivia, happy with the last minute sexual substitution of Sebastian, still cozies up to Viola at the end cooing “Sister…” As the sub-title says, “What you will”!

My main concern as I headed for 291 River Street on a sultry July evening was that the empty storefront space wouldn’t be air conditioned or have any method of active air circulation at all. You can mount the greatest production in the world but no one will enjoy it if they are uncomfortable. So I am happy to report that there is air conditioning at Bakerloo, and that it is sufficient to make the space comfortable. Phew!

Click HERE for photos and bio blurbs of the 2011 Bakerloo company.

The Bakerloo Theatre Project’s production of Twelfth Night is presented at 291 River Street, Troy, NY. The show runs two and a half hours with one intermission and is suitable for everyone old enough to enjoy Shakespeare. Performances are scheduled for July 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 28 and 30 at 8 p.m. and July 23 at 2 p.m. Individual tickets $15, season pass $25 (save $5) Wed/Thurs night shows “pay what you will,” discounts available for RPI students and high school students with valid IDs. To purchase tickets, visit www.bakerloo.org or call 877-238-5596

* There is actually considerable confusion over whether Christmas Eve (December 24) or Christmas Day (December 25) is the First Day of Christmas, and therefore whether Twelfth Night is January 5 or January 6. This concerns me personally because I was born on January 5 and need to know what kind of revels I can legitimately hold on my natal day. According to no less an authority than the Church of England, I was born on Twelfth Night, so I reserve the right to cross-dress and indulge liberally in cakes and ale!

** Undoubtedly the result of the combination of different versions of the script, this character’s name changes about halfway through the play. She clearly introduces herself as Mary at the beginning, but by the end she is consistently referred to as Maria, pronounced with a long I at the end.

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