In the Public Theater’s latest Central Park offering, a foreigner survives a shipwreck to become a desperate immigrant on a strange shore. Exploiting gender ambiguity, she insinuates herself into the local oligarch’s business—i.e., steals a job from a real citizen. And that’s the hero of this so-called comedy! If our Pumpkin-in-Chief digs his tiny claws any further into culture, such a work has zero chance of playing the Kennedy Center. But honestly, who cares? Twelfth Night already has a delightful home at the refurbished Delacorte Theater, where all may resume their love affair with free summer Shakespeare.
Director Saheem Ali literally spells out his approach to the Bard’s giddiest romantic comedy. Spanning the stage are 13-foot-high, shiny red letters reading ‘what you will,’ the play’s subtitle. Scenic designer Maruti Evans takes his cue from Robert Indiana’s iconic 1970 Love sculpture (at Rockefeller Center) down to the Didone-ish serif font. “What You Will,” of course, denotes both audience taste and longings of the persons of the play. Those familiar with the beloved farce might also reflect that reading and textuality—twisting words for the desired sense—are central: the plot turns on forged, cryptic missives, twins (human homonyms) and characters misinterpreting each other’s looks and utterances. Actors enter and exit through and around the giant characters, use smaller letters to conceal themselves and, finally, roll them around to reveal glitzy strobing bulbs for a fabulous Drag Race finale.
Clocking at under two hours with no intermission, this is a brisk, sleek and joyful Twelfth Night, measuring up to the last one at the Delacorte—the storybook 2009 version that starred Raúl Esparza, Audra McDonald and an ardent Anne Hathaway in pageboy drag. Taking the role of cross-dressing-for-survival Viola is the radiant and ever-charming Lupita Nyong’o. Her Viola has ample pluck and wistfulness to win our hearts. In a casting stunt that pays off, her brother, Junior Nyong’o, plays Viola’s twin Sebastian, separated from her by a shipwreck before the action of the play. Both wash up on the shores of Illyria, where Viola becomes servant boy to Duke Orsino (Khris Davis), a musclebound bro relentlessly courting the beauteous Olivia (Sandra Oh). For her part, the imperious Olivia has been in mourning for her brother and has no eyes for Orsino. But she does fall hard for thirst trap Caesario, as Viola has disguised herself.
As the requisite clowns, there’s Olivia’s boozing uncle, Sir Toby Belch (John Ellison Conlee), friend and mooch to Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), a dolt who fancies himself a player. Running interference between Belch and her boss, Olivia, is Maria (Daphne Rubin-Vega). Feste (Moses Sumney), the play’s melancholy fool, comes and goes strumming a guitar and showing off a delicate falsetto. Finally, Twelfth Night’s sour clown and the closest it gets to a villain is Malvolio (Peter Dinklage), Olivia’s puritanical head servant. Secretly lusting for his mistress and the power a marriage would give him; the snobby groom gets his comeuppance with a fake billet-doux penned by Maria.
The blue-chip ensemble seems to be having a blast, even with some odd acting choices. In Malvolio’s early scenes, Dinklage adopts a nasal, strangulated voice and stiff movements, as if to underscore Malvolio’s performative servility for Olivia. Luckily, as the character gets lost in his delusions of advancement and then abused by Belch and Feste, Dinklage’s vocal mannerisms fade. The Game of Thrones veteran’s a natural comedian, of course, dryly witty with a killer deadpan. And he has costuming to help (by Oana Botez): the infamous yellow stockings, rendered here as mustard-colored thigh-high boots.
Several of the production’s slyer details spring from the design. When Aguecheek threatens to leave Illyria because his wooing of Olivia has utterly failed, Ferguson enters pulling a luggage cart laden with dozens of suitcases and boxes, atop which is perched a stuffed raccoon. It’s a cute plush version of actual Delacorte mascot Romeo the Raccoon, who showed up the night I attended, traversing the wall behind the audience minutes before showtime.
There’s not a dud in the ensemble, from Sandra Oh’s flushed and impulsive Olivia to a scene-stealing turn by initialized performer “b” as Antonio, the sailor who rescues Sebastian from drowning, only to be capsized by mad devotion to him. In their few scenes, b’s Antonio arcs from swaggering and puckish to bitterly betrayed and finally pitiable. There aren’t many Twelfth Nights you leave wishing someone would write a sequel just for the heartbroken mariner. Maybe he hooks up with scorned Malvolio: happy endings all around.
These comedies are intrinsically musical, peppered with songs of the time. Accordingly, composer Michael Thurber’s vibrant, polyglot score excels, with pieces for an all-women string quartet, a jazzy art song for Sumney and even a burst of Elizabethan rap for Viola. In addition to the natural musicality of Shakespeare’s verse, we also hear bewitching fragments of Swahili (translated from the source) when Viola and Sebastian fall back into their native tongue. Dialect coach Karishma Bhagani and the Nyong’o siblings weave these lilting, wonderful notes into a swoon-worthy night’s symphony.
Twelfth Night, or What You Will | 2hrs. No intermission. | Delacorte Theater, Central Park | 212-967-7555 | How to Get Free Tickets
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