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Actors' Shakespeare Project's delightful Twelfth Night
BY CAROLYN CLAY
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A turn-of-the-20th-century dourness collides with a likable lightness of being in Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s Twelfth Night (through January 8). Staged in a high-ceilinged, marble-floored space at Cambridge (Mass.) Multicultural Arts Center and accompanied live by cello and piano, the play seems both an elegant court entertainment and, opening with Christmas crackers and an exhortation to dance, a holiday frolic. But in Robert Walsh’s studied yet fast-moving staging, one full of subtle jokes, it is also all of a piece. The look is similar to that of the gorgeously melancholy 1996 Trevor Nunn film, the audience warm-up followed by a funeral processional for black-clad Olivia and a household fitted out in frock coats and bowlers. Her brother’s recent decease has led her to cloister herself against the courtship of lovesick Duke Orsino, ruler of Illyria, the country on whose shores heroine Viola is shipwrecked at the start of the Bard’s yearning comedy of misplaced love. Actors’ Shakespeare Project, which recently mounted an impressive King Lear starring octogenarian ART vet Alvin Epstein, continues to come on strong in this its second season. As David Evett points out in a program note, Twelfth Night is the final eve of the Christmas season, when the Magi discover the infant Christ. It is also a traditional occasion for mischief in the name of the Lord of Misrule. Shakespeare’s play combines the mysteries of the human heart with high jinx involving disguise, deception, and, when it comes to the humiliation of priggish steward Malvolio, flat-out sadism. Viola assumes male attire to attend Orsino, who spends his time beseeching Olivia, who in turn falls for Viola in her guise as proxy wooer. "O Time, thou must untangle this, not I/It is too hard a knot for me t’untie," marvels Viola when she figures out what’s up. And in this Twelfth Night the unraveling is actually moving. Neither is the comedy stinted in a production that races over, around, and all about the playing space, chased by an agitated cello. Walsh’s previous ASP outing was a loungy Measure for Measure whose one fault was the miscasting of Ken Cheeseman as Puritan Angelo. Cheeseman is back in Cotton Mather mode as Malvolio, but with stellar results. His steward, interrupting the revels of Sir Toby Belch in nightshirt and hairnet or grinning maniacally in cravat and fishnet-gartered yellow tights, is both a vain, literal-minded fool and a sincerely wounded figure. And once Marya Lowry’s imperious Olivia gets Viola/Cesario into her system, she turns quite giddy with lust. Seeing the object of her desire doubled at the end, she sums up the mood with a loopily ecstatic "Most wonderful!", arms flung wide. You wonder whether she’s contemplating a threesome. Sarah Newhouse is a clever, Chaplinesque Viola with a credibly pert male exterior. She has a metallic voice on which Shakespeare’s poetry does not sit ravishingly, but she’s charming and direct — and actually looks like the Sebastian of John Kuntz. Greg Steres, no mooning aristocrat, is an imposing Orsino (albeit in jeans). Sporting brown brocade duster and a paunch, Michael Balcanoff is a more jovial than Falstaffian Sir Toby Belch, taking belts from a flask and leading by the nose the earnestly dense Sir Andrew Aguecheek of Michael F Walker, for whom light bulbs occasionally do turn on but slowly. Bobbie Steinbach is a sly, motherly sexpot of a Maria (though why Fabian is a corseted wench is a mystery). New to the troupe is former Cirque du Soleil clown Kenny Raskin, who brings a vaudeville touch to Feste, flips his bowler from nose to pate, and accompanies his mellifluous rendering of the play’s haunting ditties on mandolin and recorder. Ushering off the parade of newly matched if bewildered couples at the end, he sets Shakespeare’s fetching "When that I was and a little tiny boy/With hey, ho, the wind and the rain" to a tune both jaunty and wistful — like the production.
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