Mighty Night

This Twelfth teeters but doesn't totter

by Steve Vineberg

By William Shakespeare. Directed by Curt Tofteland. Set designed by Sarah Sullivan. Costumes by Ted Giammona. Lighting by Annmarie Duggan. With Dee Nelson, Sarah Newhouse, John Devaney, Diego Arciniegas, Sheila Stasack, Thomas Reiff, Dan Dowling, Steven Barkhimer, and Cory Scott. At Worcester Foothills Theatre, through April 30.

Illyria, the setting of Twelfth Night, is neither a forest nor an island, yet it embodies what Northrop Frye calls the "green world" of Shakespeare's comedies. That's where the protagonist takes refuge from a cruel, uncongenial environment and grows toward the realization of a mature love that -- when the anti-comic forces have dissolved or been defeated -- will form the basis for a new society and, potentially, a golden age. The shipwrecked Viola finds herself in Illyria, bereft of a brother she believes drowned, and, in the manner of Elizabethan comic heroines, she dons drag as a sort of armor for the next phase of her life. In the role of the youth Cesario, she joins the service of the duke, Orsino, pleads his case with the disaffected object of his desire, the countess Olivia (another woman in mourning for a dead brother), and finds herself caught in the middle: Olivia falls in love with "Cesario" while Viola pines for the duke. "Oh, time, thou must untangle this, not I," Viola concludes. "It is too hard a knot for me to untie."

Twelfth Night is such an enchantment of a play that on some level, I think, it always works; audiences at the new production at Foothills won't be sorry they came. But I was puzzled at the company's decision to stage it in (roughly) Renaissance period. Nothing is more distancing for a contemporary audience than doublet and hose, and they aren't generally flattering to latter-day performers. The other question mark in this revival is director Curt Tofteland's insistence on delineating every one of the comedy's 18 scenes, each of which is identified in the program and introduced with music and an attenuated set change. Sarah Sullivan's unit set requires very little shifting around to take us from Orsino's palace to Olivia's estate; why can't the actors discharge the minimal addition and removal of benches and bushes, Royal Shakespeare Company style? We aren't in the realm of realism, and these plays were meant for us to drive through, not to pause every quarter-hour so we can admire the pretty appointments. Tofteland's pacing of the actual text is snappy, but the show comes in at close to three hours, a good 10 or 15 minutes of which could easily be lopped off.

The best performance here is given by Sarah Newhouse, whose Olivia has a winning effervescence. The play urges that Olivia has worn black too long; Newhouse gives us the impression from the beginning that the life concealed under her veil is eager to burst out. And Diego Arciniegas makes the irony of Orsino's folly -- he's self-involved yet only dimly self-aware -- an amusing spectacle without forfeiting the audience's sympathy. Sheila Stasack, as Olivia's mischievous lady-in-waiting, Maria, Cory Scott as Viola's look-alike brother Sebastian (who didn't drown), Scott Kealey as Antonio the sea captain, and William Taylor as the priest are all well cast. Dee Nelson's Viola, on the other hand, is too maidenly for one of Shakespeare's bold cross-dressers, and there's too much tears-in-the-voice tremulousness in her line readings. I didn't get a sense of Viola's playfulness, her resilience, her delight in adventure; all I got, really, in scene after scene, is how unhappy Viola is because she can't have the man she adores. Nelson might make a good Hermione or Cordelia, but she's wrong for Viola.

Except for Stasack, no one seems quite right in the difficult party scenes. Both Thomas Reiff as the besotted Sir Toby Belch, Olivia's lovable, troublesome cousin, and John Devaney as his adversary, the puritan steward Malvolio, seem forced (and I don't think Tofteland has done a good job of directing them). Steven Barkhimer's clown Feste was an audience favorite at the performance I attended: he has a likable folksinger's presence, and his songs are the production's highlights. But he reads all his lines in pretty much the same way, with quotation marks around the jokes, and of everyone in the cast he seems the oddest in period costume -- I kept thinking he should be on a late-night talk show instead of hanging around the palace. It doesn't help that Ted Giammona has stuck him in such an ugly get-up, though this isn't half as bad as the atrocities Dan Dowling has to endure as Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Sir Andrew is a fop; Giammona dresses him -- and Dowling plays him -- as a female impersonator. This character's outfits should be preposterous, not embarrassing.

The scenes built around the quartet of tricksters are full of phony raucous merriment; the actors laugh so much that I didn't want to. Other scenes strike just the right tone, like Olivia's wooing of the bedazzled Sebastian and especially the finale, which is companionable and unforced and sent me out feeling buoyant. The production, clearly, is a mixed bag. But even when it teeters, the play remains Shakespeare's most nearly perfect comedy.