Twelfth Night ISF 2016

Or: The Snapping String

Something is rotten in the state of Illyria. Wind whistles through the broken pains of palaces (hauntingly rendered by Russell Metheny), the possessions of the dead clutter the lives of the living, and a woman (Jillian Kates) is trapped in the attic, with only an electric guitar to pass the time and express her malaise. (What is she doing up there? Is she an reclusive musician? Some former flame Duke Orsino (Juan Lebron Rivera), that lovable but unbalanced man, has hidden away? We don't know.) With multiple plots sweeping in and around each other, ill-stamped love and tottering hubris, and the sweet heady scent of misdirection and delusion luring folk of all stripes to their doom, Drew Barr’s elegantly lugubrious production seems to ooze the bitter-sweet molasses of Anton Checkov’s comedies.

Nowhere does Barr pour the borscht so thick as in his creation of Olivia (Christine Weber). In an echo of Masha’s line from the seagull, “I feel as if I’d been born a long, long time ago. I drag my life behind me like an endless train. And often I haven’t the slightest desire to live.” Costume designer Kim Krumm Sorenson (also notable for the snazzy suits of various vintages that spangle the cast) has taken Masha at her word and swathed Olivia in a long black train, wide enough to drag the body of mourned for brother behind her. But far from securing to despair, Weber infuses the Countess with a great desire to live. We see not the typical Olivia, a cool and collected lady cracked by a pretty wit, but a girl, suffocated by the dictations of grief and buffeted by the demands of Orsino’s courtship. When recounting the diverse lists of her beauty, Olivia has not a shred of flippancy but paces out a gloomy fate. We see just how young she is in taking comfort from her fool Feste (M.A. Taylor) and how awed, captivated, titillated (There are giggles!) she is by Viola’s (Cassandra Bissell) earnestness; the cross dresser a bright comet blazing through the ordained orbits of her universe.

What a shame then, that Viola’s passion is directed elsewhere. Hulled and sunk by her affection to the Duke, Bissell’s outcries of passion, draped in the borrowed robes of his love to Olivia, geysers out in delectable anguish. But what makes those outbursts all the more pained is the fact that they flow from a levelheaded, wistfully wry and even good humored woman, who finds herself thrown into impossible positions far beyond her control. In a natty suit her common stance is, “Yo. Still here. Patience on Monument. Not going anywhere.” Grief, we feel, she knows how to deal with; it’s desire that’s put her through the wringer.

Other fine performances come from Laura Perrotta’s Maira, a cool and canary-catching woman, pocketing crumbs from the table of joy. A particularly poignant moment chimes when she lets her hair down late at night to plot and curse and drink. Taylor’s Feste too, with his plaintive songs, kneads in a salt of private sorrow as he needles and pokes the company, brining more humanity to the fool.

It’s not quite Twelfth Night as you’d expected to find. There’s glass in the glitter, and humor snakes rather than crackles. It’s greatest comedy comes from it’s moments of stillness; show-stopping shocks and tiny mistakes snowballing to enormous size. It’s chekovian humor: what you lose in madcapery you make up for in passion. Not to say there aren’t madcap moments: Malvolio (Lynn Robert Berg) in both his titan’s imperiousness and the wild luxuriation of his fall are magnificent harvests of humor. Like the unexplained sound of a snapping string in The Cherry Orchard, mimicked again and again by the unknown guitarist, there is a sad echo of all that has been lost, that clouds even the brightest of hopes. So come to be moved, not just to laugh.