Twelfth Night ISF 2025

Or: Summer Night Pool Side Shakespeare

It’s a peculiar experience, after becoming accustomed to “Bit” Shakespeare, to suddenly watch a comedy in a slower, more earnest key. “Bit” Shakespeare, dear reader, is the common practice of loading up a Shakespeare play like a baked potato with all the trimmings and ramming through the intricacies of the plot at top speed, all so we can get to the sword fights, sex scenes, dances, and modern-language asides, in hopes that the attention atrophied audience will come back for the company’s money makers: the murder mysteries and the musicals. This is not to say that Bit Shakespeare is not a bad or lesser thing (they’re often wildly funny and preciously self aware), or that Sara Bruner’s take on the insane clown posse that is Twelfth Night, or What You Will, is a serious scholarly piece devoid of gags, sword fights, audience interaction, or innuendo.The experience is rather like finding oneself at a different elevation; it takes a minute to find your breath.

The current Twelfth Night under the Idaho Shakespeare Festival stars has all the fun bits in spades, but they sit as garnishes on the story itself. To carry a metaphor onward, you can taste the starchy richness of the potato underneath the excitement of bacon bits, the zing chives, the feel-good-goo of cheese. This Twelfth Night moves forward in a more measured key, taking time for our collective attention to be drawn to the language, the pearls of poetry that still gleam four hundred years later. And of course, as Brunner is by now well known for, there are judicious edits to keep the morality of the story in step with our present day understandings of what is right and good.

The wooden waves of Courtney O’Neil’s set culminate downstage in an aquamarine faux-pool and piece together the gentle swell and leisurely summer melancholy of the production. The finest moment of this comes in Olivia’s (Angela Utrera) attempted seduction of the disguised Viola (Grayson Heyl) via that tried and true method of sunscreen application. This is no mere bit. It is an exquisitely crafted piece done in tandem to the language, by turns sexy and disastrous.

It’s a star turn for Utrera who, throughout the show, slowly peels apart the somber artichoke of her grief and helplessness to show a zany and exuberant young woman, full of beans and wild ideas that land less well than she intended. For all Olivia is barking up the wrong tree in her pursuit, we cannot help but cheer Utrera on as she fails, ever more gloriously, to bring her will to bear.

Heyl also brings a beautiful mix of suffering and silliness to her Viola. The play’s heroine is given short shrift as the crux of her predicament (pining for Duke Orsino (Jeremy Gallardo) but unable to express it from her manly weeds) is thinly strung along between chunks of the Below Stairs Shenanigans (Shakespeare himself was not above writing a Bit comedy.) In response to this narrative difficulty, Heyl makes the absolute most of her milage. You can feel the anguish radiating from her all the way in the back row anytime Orsino pals around her, a fever of feeling sunk in her very bones, or the bitter pity she extends to Olivia, her beloved’s beloved who be-love’n on her. Or the untamable hope, marinated in sorrow, found in her beautiful, unconscious duet with Feste (Theo Allyn) that captures Orsino’s heart without her knowing. And braided through this masterful turn of emotional expression, Heyl flings herself into the freedom of her characters Cringeiness embracing the fact that, of all Shakespeare’s heroines, Viola is a Funny Little Dork. “I am The Man!” indeed.

Two other performances of note, each with a surefooted understanding, are Malvolio (Joe Wegner) and Maria (Christina Clark). Wegner’s steward does not bluster or rage; it is his steady precision that elicits gales of laughter, whether he is laying down language as precisely as a jigsaw, or velociraptoring his way around the stage yellow-stocking’d and cross-gartered, or laying out his case with tearful composure. His Malvolio is a solid presence both sympathetic, mockable, and casually cruel to harmless Feste, sparking their own wounded revenge for the rest of the play.

If Wegner triumphs through the Less Is More philosophy of acting, Clark equally excels through the application of More Is More. Her Maria rather than just the keeper of the single braincell Sirs Toby (Dar’Jon Marquise Bentley*) and Andrew (James Alexander Rankin), but joyfully leads all manner of hijinx, spinning up jest after jest, dispensing jab after jab and gamely getting just as chaos much as she gives. Its a joyful, brave expansion of a character, again totally rooted in the story as given and making the play that much richer.

All these strong performances, illuminate the chill evening in the Idaho riverside. The leisurely pace of the play, the time Bruner takes to highlight the language may take a moment to get to, but it is designed for an audience’s enjoyment and edification; substance over flash. And while the laughter it inspires may not be a full two and a half hours of raucous guffaws, there is a rolling sea of chuckles throughout,  punctuated now and then by waterspouts of genuine cackling delight, and the even rarer to come by full audience sighs of sympathy and understanding. There’s no dashing about this pool, but the water is fabulously fine.

* Aven Tavishel 2025 Entrant