Photos courtesy of the Long Beach Playhouse.
There was a Shakespeare professor at my college that often said, “Even bad Shakespeare is better than good anybody else.”
He was kidding of course, but it must be stated that even at Shakespeare’s most irreverent, he still managed to sprinkle his plays with timeless puns, linguistic feats and even, at times, theatrical awe.
Twelfth Night is not great Shakespeare. It is overly long, rambling and often sillier than it is funny. It comes closer to being mindless entertainment than being a work of theater than one may expect from the Bard, and lacks the depth of character that makes his most famous works such classics. At its best, however, when under the hand of a brilliant director and creative team, Twelfth Night can feel playful and effervescent, a sweet champaign cocktail of a play.
Unfortunately for the The Long Beach Playhouse and for the rest of us as well, their current incarnation of Twelfth Night tastes artificially sweet and lacks the resourcefulness to draw our attention from the play’s inherent shortcomings.
The plot of Twelfth Night should sound familiar to anyone who knows Shakespeare, as it utilizes many of his most familiar tropes.
Two identical twins (always a tricky situation to portray on stage) are separated from each other after a boat they were traveling on crashes at sea. Sebastian, the male, is presumed to be dead and Viola, the female, is saved by the ship’s captain. With the help of the captain, Viola disguises herself as a man and is hired by the Duke Orsino to serve him as a messenger.
Orsino uses Viola to get the attention of the Countess Olivia, whom he is certain he is in love with, but who won’t see him, or any suitor, until the her seven years of mourning for her deceased father and brother are over. As is to be expected, everyone falls in love with the wrong person, there are mix ups, penis and maiden-head jokes, cross-dressing bits, mistaken identities, a fool, some rather garish yellow tights and ambiguous homo-eroticism in spades that follow, but not much in terms of insight or enlightenment.
Shakespeare, believe it or not, was a pretty witty guy, and in spite of much of the universes’s attempts to prove that they are more clever or knowing than he is, he nearly always comes out on top. In fact, when directors spend so much time encouraging casts to chew scenery and milk natural silences for comedy, they often end up with bewildered audiences more inclined to laugh from nervousness and disbelief, than due to anything actually deemed humorous.
Director Gregory Cohen shows little to no restraint in letting his cast run wild. Scenes that should be brief and breezy are dragged out with shtick, and the few moments of tenderness that Shakespeare allows his script to hold are brushed over in hopes of getting us more quickly to the next bit. The pantomime he asks the righteously brave John Byrd to perform as Malvolio in act two scene five is an embarrassment to the production and the source material. Mr. Byrd is a bold and seemingly fearless actor, but Mr. Cohen here allows him to dive off the deep end without a flotation device or emergency exit as a resource.
This is the scene of Twelfth Night when the subplot of the play is established. It is the moment that the audience should land safely in the director’s hand, feeling certain that they are being taken care of for the duration of their excursion. Unfortunately, when Malvolio is thrown to the sharks, thus we are as well. From here on in, we are left to fend for ourselves.
Only Ani Marderosian as Olivia, with her balance of reserve and melodrama, and Dean Figone as Sir Toby Belch, with his natural charisma and machismo, manage to find sure enough footing in the shifting quicksand of this production to establish the suggestion of what it could have been.
In his director’s note, Mr. Cohen muses about how there may be no purpose for this play being performed or written besides that of “entertainment.” While I agree with the him theoretically and have already stated that Twelfth Night is not top shelf Shakespeare, I find it troubling that a director with a self proclaimed love of the Bard’s work would not try to find some justification for these character’s existences.
To treat a work of theater like it is merely entertainment and not just entertaining sells its actors and to a greater extent, it’s characters, short. If even the director can’t find the inherent truth, humor or tragedy in the material being presented, how are we supposed to be able to?
As Viola says; “O, time, thou must untangle this, not I. It is too hard a knot for me to untie!”