A Merry and Rambunctious “Twelfth Night” in Central Park
On the Saturday evening that I saw “Twelfth Night, or What You Will,” the sole production of the Public Theatre’s Shakespeare in the Park summer season, a raccoon scurried furtively along the top of a wall at the Delacorte. “Twelfth Night” marks the exuberant reopening of the open-air venue, after an eighteen-month renovation that promised, in part, to solve the amphitheatre’s raccoon problem. Central Park’s wildness, though, shall not be denied. This “Twelfth Night,” directed by Saheem Ali, comes fully stocked with celebrities—including Lupita Nyong’o as Viola, Sandra Oh as Olivia, and Peter Dinklage as Malvolio. But, for a few moments, the raccoon was our star.
A part of me did notice that we were lacking a certain animal nature onstage. One look at the set, designed by Maruti Evans, tells you that Ali and company are trying to underscore the comedy’s romance, if in the high-school-prom sense of the word: the floor is patterned with red flowers, a string quartet plays as the audience finds its seats, and, at the back edge of the stage, thirteen-foot-tall letters spelling out “WHAT YOU WILL” glow red and purple under lighting designed by Bradley King. The letters, which actors sometimes pose alongside (Oh perches punningly in the O), recall those giant signs which give tourists a place to take selfies. It’s Illyria as a step-and-repeat photo-call: red carpet, big stars, major rebrand.
The shipwrecked Viola, Shakespeare’s deftest heroine, disguises herself as a man to stay safe while she finds her footing in a foreign land, and Nyong’o presents her as a figure of maximum spirit and pluck. Viola invents male mannerisms on the fly—she realizes a beat late that she should manspread when she sits—and treats her accidental romantic conquest, Countess Olivia, with a kind of merry contempt. Oh plays the countess as an impulsive drama queen who at first rejects all offers of marriage only to fall head over heels for Viola’s cross-dressed messenger. Oddly, Oh doesn’t seem to express the bereavement that is Olivia’s reason—or excuse—for withdrawing from the world of men. (We hear that her brother has died, but when we meet her she’s in a white-and-black evening gown, rollicking around with her staff.) Neither Oh’s dizzy countess nor Nyong’o’s charming, feckless Viola ever takes the reins of this production, but that would be hard to do. Ali has the cast gallop straight through a streamlined script—the show is less than two hours, with no intermission—leaving nuance and character motivations behind.
Nyong’o, even when speaking lines about heartache, rarely registers her secret love for her employer, Duke Orsino (Khris Davis). Davis plays his part hilariously as a preening, empty-brained peacock—we see the Duke, variously, pumping iron, fencing with his buddies, and demanding post-workout massages. (The costume designer Oana Botez clearly had fun gilding a fencing jacket for him.) He doesn’t seem interested either in Olivia, whom he theoretically wants to marry, or in the tempting, cross-dressed Viola. Ali does get comic mileage out of Orsino’s house, depicted here as a luxe man cave, where a half-dozen bro courtiers flatter his fragile masculinity. But where we gain an amusing clown we lose a love story. Viola and Orsino both at least appear to really admire Orsino’s impressive muscles, so . . . swipe right, I guess.
Nyong’o conveys the show’s deeper romantic yearning in one crucial scene, when Ali changes the script to let Viola sing to her beloved at dinner. Viola and her supposedly dead brother, Sebastian—played by Junior Nyong’o, Lupita’s actual brother and the show’s standout discovery—are portrayed here as Swahili speakers, and when she serenades Orsino she sings the great Swahili love song “Malaika.” Orsino doesn’t understand what she’s saying, which makes the moment both cunningly multilayered and true to Shakespeare’s playful gender confusion. “Malaika” she calls the hulking Duke—angel, beautiful girl.
“Twelfth Night” usually belongs either to Viola or to Malvolio. This time, it’s Malvolio’s show. The character, Olivia’s bossy butler, is one of the greatest parts in Shakespeare, and Dinklage delights in it. Malvolio’s sneering high-handedness enrages the hedonistic members of Olivia’s household: her drunken cousin, Sir Toby Belch (John Ellison Conlee); his vacuous buddy Andrew Aguecheek (Jesse Tyler Ferguson); and her saucy maid, Maria (Daphne Rubin-Vega). To orchestrate his downfall, they make him believe that Olivia has fallen in love with him. Nobility awaits! Dinklage, Conlee, and Ferguson—all gifted comics—have developed some wonderful bits: Toby and Andrew snort coke off the edge of a bathtub at one point, and a frowning Dinklage bustles around with a hair dryer, ruining their fun. Yet the occasional poignancy of both Toby and Andrew, the sot and the fool, doesn’t emerge in this production. Only Dinklage finds the tragic notes in his role, as well as a Buster Keaton level of physical comedy.
What most of us remember about Malvolio is his yellow stockings, but Dinklage’s performance reminds us that his character also best embodies the play’s title. “Twelfth Night” refers to the final day of the Christmas revels, a time of misrule and carnival, when the social order has been turned, temporarily, upside down. Malvolio, tricked by a fake letter written by Maria, takes class mobility seriously. He comes to believe that “some have greatness thrust upon ’em,” reaches above his station, and then is driven nearly mad. Social inversion is a lie; after Twelfth Night comes Epiphany. That’s a bleak thing for Shakespeare to tell us.
There’s a great deal of devalued currency in “Twelfth Night.” Wallets, coins, and rings are carelessly passed around this little society, and messages are corrupted—from Orsino’s wooing of Olivia, which is accidentally undone by his own go-between, Viola, to the letters that deceive Malvolio. It’s important, when staging “Twelfth Night,” to consider those shifts in exchange and value. For instance, since silly Sir Toby is broke, much of what he does is predicated on drawing money from the richer Sir Andrew like a bank account; the maid Maria’s prank involves a mésalliance plot because she herself wants to marry Toby, who is of a higher class. Yet Ali’s production isn’t interested in making these subtleties and hierarchies clear. The plot requires us to understand all that rich-poor, upstairs-downstairs stuff, but, when we first encounter Maria, Rubin-Vega is wearing a floor-length ice-blue satin gown with a cape and diamond chandelier earrings. If you had to guess, you’d assume that she was the lady of the house or, I don’t know, Elsa from “Frozen.”
She looks great, though. An aristocratically garbed Maria might not make any narrative sense, but perhaps Ali and Botez just wanted to present RubinVega gorgeously, to approach the play as a kind of court pageant or gala where everyone dresses to impress. And, anyway, we may not be meant to take things like “sense” seriously; the whole night is a frothy frolic, the Park sighs with warm breezes, I did have a wonderful time. Ali gestures at a few serious ideas: near the beginning of the play, he has Nyong’o escape from her shipwreck in a Zodiac, the type of small inflatable boat sometimes used to rescue refugees from the Channel, and the siblings speak their lines to each other in Swahili, making their long-delayed reunion a wonderfully sweet and private thing. But these moments remain isolated.
So this “Twelfth Night” is merry and rambunctious and comically inventive—the curtain call becomes a party, with the entire cast in fabulous disco-medieval regalia—but almost never truly stirring. If there’s an argument for chucking reason to the wind and just enjoying the vibes, then the experimental musician Moses Sumney, as the jester Feste, is best at making it. Drifting around the stage in billowing black silk drapery, Sumney pops in and out of scenes, singing with a mystical, human-theremin voice, accompanying himself on electric guitar. When he comes by, Feste turns the mood strange and woozy and full of possibility—pills after midnight, or what you will. ♦
