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The Publick’s charming Twelfth Night
BY STEVE VINEBERG
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Twelfth Night
By William Shakespeare. Directed by Diego Arciniegas. Set by Susan Zeeman Rogers. Costumes by Amanda Monteiro. Lighting by Nathaniel Packard. Music by Haddon Kime. With Susanne Nitter, Stacy Fischer, Diego Arciniegas, Steven Barkhimer, Bill Gardiner, Nathan Blew, Ben Lambert, Richard LaFrance, and Devon Jencks. At the Publick Theatre, in repertory through September 27.
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A case can be made for Twelfth Night as the finest of Shakespeare’s comedies. It shouldn’t be hard to persuade theatergoers who catch the charming al fresco mounting of the play at the Publick Theatre. The production has been staged by the Publick’s artistic director, Diego Arciniegas, with a felicitous combination of comic ebullience and the kind of theatrical expertise and care that make an exceedingly difficult enterprise look easy. Arciniegas and his well-trained cast bring a contemporary brittleness to the play by the most old-fashioned of means: they mine the text for meaning rather than embellishing it. You recognize the full range of characters in Shakespeare’s tale of love because the actors find the humanity in them. The play rests, as Shakespearean comedies tend to, on the complexity of feeling of its women. It revolves around two whose grief for lost brothers has retired them, far too young but only temporarily, from the game of love. Viola (Susanne Nitter) survives a shipwreck that, she believes, has claimed her brother, Sebastian; cast ashore in foreign Illyria, she disguises herself as a youth named Cesario and enters the service of the Duke Orsino (Nathan Blew). The object of the duke’s adoration is the Countess Olivia (Stacy Fischer), whose mourning for her own brother facilitates her rejection of Orsino’s suit. But though he’s more in love with love than with Olivia, whom he barely knows, the duke is loath to take no for an answer. He sends Cesario to woo the countess for him, and Olivia falls for the servant. Fortunately, Viola has a twin of the right gender — Sebastian (Ben Lambert) isn’t dead after all. Most of the other characters are engaged in a subplot in which Olivia’s Puritan steward, Malvolio (Arciniegas), enrages the life embracers in her household: her dipsomaniac uncle, Sir Toby Belch (Steven Barkhimer); her serving woman, Maria (Devon Jencks); her fool, Feste (Bill Gardiner); and Toby’s drinking companion, the idiotic knight Andrew Aguecheek (Richard LaFrance). They’re stirred to an act of revenge that also pivots on love: Malvolio’s fancy that Olivia is enamored of him. It has to be a delusion, because Malvolio is, as Olivia intuits, "sick of self love." This Twelfth Night — which Arciniegas has staged, on Susan Zeeman Rogers’s ingenious set (a movable collage of Persian rugs), with a superb eye for composition — doesn’t shy from exposing the characters’ follies, including those of Sebastian’s rescuer, the sea captain Antonio (Eric Hamel), who suffers from an excess of bravado. That may be why the merrymakers in the play, who usually suffer in production from strained efforts at knockabout humor, are truly funny here. Barkhimer’s drunken antics are expertly timed, and a scene that almost never works — where he and his companion Fabian (George Saulnier III) set Cesario and the cowardly Aguecheek against each other in combat — gives LaFrance the opportunity to execute some fine physical comedy. Arciniegas also stages what Shakespeare merely mentions at final curtain: Sir Toby and Maria falling in love. Meanwhile, the two performers who maintain the balance between comedy and melancholy — crucial to any Twelfth Night — are Gardiner, as a roly-poly Feste whose tenderest ironies come out in his songs (wonderfully scored here by Haddon Kime), and Fischer as the countess, whose air of privilege deflates when she tumbles for Cesario. Fischer’s performance is a model of craftsmanship (precision and clarity): she uses a combination of the given circumstances and the language to shift emotional directions continually, sometimes in mid line. Susanne Nitter doesn’t quite have the richness of feeling Viola requires; she keeps up with the ensemble but she doesn’t lead it (as Viola should). And Arciniegas makes his sole directorial error with his own performance, which turns hambone in the second half. The scene where Malvolio appears to Olivia garbed in the absurd costume he’s been led to think she might admire marked the only time in the production when I felt I was being milked for laughs. Otherwise the laughs come most easily because they’re coaxed most gracefully.
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