Once Upon a ‘Night’

by Tzvi Kahn

On a blustery midsummer’s day in early August, hundreds of people gathered in the middle of Manhattan during the wee hours of the morning for the sole purpose of watching a group of famous Hollywood actors dress up as clowns, dim-witted knights, impertinent egotists, and members of the opposite sex.  Well, maybe that’s nothing new or surprising for movie stars.  Nevertheless, when the Bard opens his immortal theatrical storehouse of comedic goods— for free— in Central Park, cinematic headliners fervently desiring to polish their résumé, in addition to veteran New Yorkers anxious for a bargain and quixotic tourists eager to go stargazing, can only be expected— some would say obligated— to show up in droves.

Luckily, I had the good fortune of waiting on line for a mere three and a half hours to receive my tickets; many, to my amusement and amazement, had brought their sleeping bags and spent the night in the park to ensure they would be the first to secure those precious slips of paper.  Someday, I imagine, a few millennia after Saddam Hussein has turned the planet into a giant crater, historians and anthropologists will look back at us histrionic junkies and wonder whether we were merely silly, pathetic, obsessively “artsy,” slightly neurotic, or absolutely, no-holds-barred demented.

The answer is probably a little of each.  Then again, when dealing with what is arguably one of Shakespeare’s funniest and most delightful plays, who can say for sure?  “Twelfth Night,” presented by The Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, amounts to, despite substantial media criticism, an endearing, pleasant midsummer diversion.  Director Brian Kulick proves quite ably that hiring Hollywood biggies for live theater, and for Shakespearean comedy no less, need not connote a watered-down or inferior production.  With a talented, all-star lineup including Kristen Johnson, Christopher Lloyd, and Jimmy Smits, Shakespeare’s play of mistaken identity, disguise, and deception has rarely looked this good.

“Twelfth Night” follows the seemingly disconnected escapades of a series of eccentric, but always charming, personalities, whose boisterous vagaries conjoin mellifluously at the play’s conclusion to form a happy ending for all.  The skeleton of the plot, or plots, looks something like this: Orsino (Mr. Smits), Duke of Illyria, loves the Countess Olivia (Kathryn Meisle), who in turn adores Orsino’s page “Cesario” (Julia Stiles), who, unbeknownst to the Countess and Duke, is in fact a woman named Viola disguised as a man in order to gain employment by Orsino.  Got that?  Meanwhile, Sir Toby Belch (Oliver Platt), Olivia’s uncle, who loves Maria (Ms. Johnson), Olivia’s gentlewoman, plots, along with the latter, the buffoonish Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Michael Stuhlbarg), and the jester Feste (Michael Potts), a cunning prank on Malvolio (Mr. Lloyd), Olivia’s steward, whose haughtiness and pomposity are the source of ample resentment on the part of the pranksters.  The beguiling foursome, at the direction of Maria, decide to forge a letter by Olivia so that the steward will believe the Countess is actually in love with him, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Kulick’s stage design exploits the light, sprightly frivolous tone of Shakespeare’s script in original and refreshing ways.  The left side of the stage consists of a large slide upon which many of the actors make grandiose and often comical stage entrances, usually with the aid of ornate carpets and enthusiastic applause from the audience.  During the show’s latter half, hundreds of roses embellish the stage, frequently serving as unexpectedly witty prop contrivances and romantic apparatuses.  Flashy treasure chests are also utilized for unusual, and invariably hilarious, functions, including, in their funniest avatar, a cage for poor allegedly “lunatic” Malvolio.  And the stage itself is shaped like a giant blue wave, operating not only as the turbulent waters upon which Viola and Sebastian’s (Zach Braff) boat is shipwrecked, but as a symbol of the unpredictability and haphazardness of the play’s intricate web of entangled relationships.

Such devices lend a distinct air of sunny congeniality and airy humor to the show that correspond to the lighthearted nature of the script itself.  They also accentuate the respective temperaments of the play’s diverse range of characters.

Not that the actors are incapable of sustaining their own stage presence.  In fact, despite the large number of characters in the play’s repertoire, most members of the cast do an admirable job in developing their own distinctive dispositions and personas, enabling each of them — with the conspicuous exception of Ms. Stiles — to stand out singularly from his or her co-stars.

As Viola, Stiles delivers what probably constitutes the most understated performance of a generally energetic evening.  Though her work is not altogether unconvincing, Stiles frequently looks fatigued and lacks the energy and vitality that permeate the rest of the cast.  What’s worse, the cumbersome Elizabethan dialect of Shakespeare’s native tongue does not seem as natural and inherent to Stiles as it does to her co-stars; one gets the impression that she is desperate to fling off her costume as quickly as possible and start confabulating in ordinary, twenty-first century English.  As a result, the show’s overall tone of playful animation and zesty exuberance is brought down a notch.

Smits plays the love-infested Duke Orsino with a self-assured bravado and gentlemanly paternalism that carefully avoids crossing the ever-delicate line between self-confidence and conceit.  His portrayal belies the picture of the Duke presented by a rudimentary reading of Shakespeare’s script, which clearly depicts Orsino as an arrogant, self-absorbed, and often-violent man.  Still, Smits’s rather liberal interpretation of the character works quite well in this production, augmenting its pervasively affable mood and making Viola’s attraction to the Duke somewhat more believable than it might be otherwise.

The Duke’s initial paramour, Olivia, is imbued by Meisle with suave prestige and dignity, in a portrayal that shifts masterfully from the high-brow and authoritative leadership of a reputable Countess to the delirious intoxication and care-free rapture of a woman in love.  Her composed, self-confident femininity stands in welcome contrast to the hermaphroditic bewilderment of Stiles’s Viola, though it does make it all the more difficult to understand what exactly attracts the former to the latter.

The real joys of this play, however, are found in Lloyd’s Malvolio and the quaternity of pranksters played by Platt, Johnson, Stuhlbarg, and Potts.  In particular, Stuhlbarg steals the show as the cowardly Sir Andrew Aguecheek, whose puerile, bumbling attempts at ordinary conversation result in some of the most uproarious comedic moments in the play.  As partners in crime against Olivia’s haughty steward, Platt’s drunkenly boisterous Sir Toby and Johnson’s conniving Maria constitute a refreshingly mischievous comic duo, while Potts’s canny portrayal of the smart-aleck clown proves, contrary to the assertions of most of the play’s characters, that Feste is no fool.  And the always-lovable Lloyd flawlessly saturates his rendition of the hapless Malvolio with all the gullible, supercilious nuances the role demands, and he does so with perfect comedic timing and pitch.

Of course, for many theatergoers, none of this would be worth spending an entire morning on line in stifling humidity for tickets.  And perhaps no show in the world would be worth doing so— or should be.  But for those brave souls longing to sacrifice their self-pride and creature comforts for a tranquil night with the Bard, “Twelfth Night” in Central Park provides the perfect opportunity.