Theatre in Review: Twelfth Night (The Acting Company/Polonsky Shakespeare Center)

	Stephen Pelinski. Photo: Evan Krape.

The first glimpses one gets of Maria Aitken's production set off alarm bells. Lee Savage's set depicts the kind of whitewashed villa that adorns seaside towns all over Europe; it appears to have been built no earlier than 1975 and looks the worse for wear, its walls covered with grime. And yet the characters' wardrobes draw on a bewildering variety of periods. Poor shipwrecked Viola makes it to dry land wearing only a slip of the sort found in any contemporary ladies' lingerie shop. Yet when we meet Maria, servant to the grief-stricken Olivia, she looks like a pioneering female secretary of the World War I era, complete with pencil skirt and leg o' mutton sleeves. Viola, disguised as a man, wears a Mao jacket, as does her brother. Orsino and several other male leads wear suits with a mid-twentieth-century feel. Andrew Aguecheek, on the other hand, seems to have wandered in from a revival of The Boy Friend; at one point, he wears golf knickers, and later, a white pinstripe suit with a straw boater hat. Then again, Feste, the clown, sports a really impressive set of dreadlocks. Olivia is arrayed in mourning suitable for, say, the daughter of Edward VII, but, as she falls in love with Viola, who is dressed as a man, she begins shedding layers and adding bits of glitter until she looks like an Edwardian madam.

The thinking behind this approach is known only to God and Candice Donnelly, the costume designer, and it leaves one tensely expecting an evening of incoherence. The surprise is that Aitken's direction is unusually lucid. Plenty of wild things happen in Twelfth Night, some of them seemingly motivated by nothing more than authorial fiat, and Aitken sets out to impose logic and order on these frantic, farcical proceedings; to an unexpectedly great extent, she succeeds.

For example, the director switches the order of the opening scenes. Instead of starting with the lovesick Orsino announcing, "If music be the food of love, play on," she brings on Viola, alone without the ship's captain and (budget permitting) additional sailors with whom she usually engages in a lively exchange of exposition. Instead, she encounters Feste, and the two of them, hidden, look on as Orsino declares his unrequited love. It's a clever move that gives Viola, who falls for Orsino at first sight, a solid reason for slipping into men's clothing and joining his court. Aitken also makes clear that Viola and Orsino share a mutual attraction. When he calls on Feste to sing, Viola sits between Orsino's knees; as he gets caught up in the music, he unconsciously strokes her arms, causing visible discomfort in both man and maid; more than once, standing face to face, they nearly fall into a kiss. All of this deepens Viola's dilemma and lays the groundwork for the finale, in which Orsino switches his affections from Olivia to Viola, seemingly in a trice.

Similarly, each time that Viola, impersonating the young man Cesario, presses Orsino's romantic case to Olivia, the latter slips further and further out of mourning, coaxed back to life by her surging feelings for this young man -- who, as it happens, is really a woman. Thus, Viola, the play's central figure, becomes even more of a linchpin than usual, caught up as she is in two utterly impossible romances as long as she denies her true gender. In these scenes, Aitken proves to be an especially accurate cartographer of the rough terrain of romantic love.

This is the rare Twelfth Night that errs on the side of sophistication, scanting the roughhousing farce of Toby Belch, Maria, Andrew, and Malvolio, the pretentious steward who is the victim of one of drama's most heartlessly amusing practical jokes. Aitken hasn't cast the play with natural clowns, so these scenes don't take over the production as they so often do. Lee E. Ernst's Toby Belch for once isn't an audition for the role of Falstaff, and Stephen Pelinski doesn't push Malvolio around the bend, as so many actors do, although the sight of him roused from sleep, wearing a hairnet and rollers to keep his coiffure in place is an especially amusing touch. But even the famous cross-gartered scene, in which Malvolio, hideously dressed and displaying an equally hideous rictus, alarms the household, isn't as outrageous as it sometimes seems, and you might conceivably spare a bit of regret over his ill treatment. When he returns at the play's end, vowing revenge, his pants drop, stripping away any iota of dignity he has left.

Among the large cast, the standouts are Kate Forbes as Maria, especially when briskly hatching the plot to humiliate Malvolio; Matthew Greer as the handsome, well-spoken, deeply mixed-up Orsino; Elizabeth Heflin as the witty, argumentative Olivia; Joshua David Robinson as the unflappable Feste; and, most of all, Susanna Stahlmann as Viola, who finds herself caught in one net of intrigue after another. In his early scenes, Michael Gotch's supremely feckless Andrew seems lacking in energy and humor, but he improves as he goes along, earning plenty of chuckles when goaded, against his will, into dueling, with swords, with "Cesario." ("I was adored once, too," he announces at one point, apropos of nothing, and one has to laugh at the vagueness of his recollection.)

The production also benefits from Philip S. Rosenberg's lighting, which creates a variety of tinted skies, and the original music and sound design of John Gromada; his latter contribution includes the roar of the surf, birdsong, gunfire, and bells. If you are looking for belly laughs, this is not the Twelfth Night for you, but there is real pleasure to be had in its solid character insights and its clear-eyed view of the mess created by even the most authentic romantic feelings. And Aitken adds a final ambiguous touch that suggests the strange possibility of Olivia escaping her own happy ending. In this Twelfth Night, the merry and the melancholy are all mixed up. -- David Barbour