Great Fun With Chesapeake Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night'

Perhaps no Shakespearean comedy is as concerned with madness—or makes so explicit a connection between madness and love—as Twelfth Night, currently playing in Ellicott City in a solidly entertaining production by the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company. Even the play's little-used subtitle, "Or What You Will," suggests a kind of madness on the part of the author—not only to permit but to encourage us to make of his work what we will!—as we watch him completely demolish the quaint notion that we have the slightest bit of control over whom and how we love.

Twelfth Night presents us with a pair of twins, Viola and Sebastian, who have been parted at sea following a terrible shipwreck.  Each has washed separately upon foreign shores, and each presumes the other is dead.  The ever-resourceful Viola disguises herself as a young man in order to gain employment serving the region's handsome Duke Orsino. Her first assignment at court is to plead Orsino's increasingly hopeless love suit to Olivia, a beautiful countess who has vowed not to marry for seven years while she mourns the recent deaths of her father and brother.

Viola succeeds where previous messengers have failed—she actually manages to speak to Olivia—and here is where things really start to get complicated.  Olivia falls in love with the disguised Viola, who has developed a secret passion for Orsino, who almost seems attracted to his strangely feminine new servant (whose face, he brightly observes, is "smooth and rubious," and whose voice is "as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound").

Meanwhile Sebastian stumbles into town, accompanied by a devoted sailor named Antonio and setting in motion a chain of mistaken identities that gives nearly every character occasion to wonder whether he or she has not suddenly and without warning gone mad. And it is this impression—that the world has been flipped upside-down and we are the only ones yet to be told—that the CSC, led by director Jenny Leopold, too infrequently achieves.

Don't misunderstand me—this is a highly enjoyable production, full of sparkling moments and several performances that are just as good, I have no doubt, as any you'll find in the more star-studded production of Twelfth Night currently playing in New York's Central Park.  In particular, Jenny Crooks (who also found time to assistant direct) is a revelation as Viola.  Her long hair tucked beneath a sailor's cap, her body wrapped tightly in a coat, Crooks channels all of Viola's youthful energies into an endearing blend of poise and perfect awkwardness—as Viola's crazy errands spin her around the stage, propelled by forces she only vaguely comprehends ("O Time," she proclaims in one of her signature lines, "thou must untangle this, not I"), it seems her limbs are at the mercy of offstage puppeteers battling for control over them.

Crooks is one of the few performers who seems totally at home on the venue's large outdoor stage.  (The play is staged before the Greek-style ruins in Patapsco Female Institute Historic Park.)  In contrast, Michael Boynton's Orsino and—to a lesser extent—Laura Rocklyn's Olivia struggle with the at-times conflicting demands of vocal projection and vocal variety.  Boynton is all pomp and circumstance and surface gestures.  While these are not unreasonable choices for the lovesick duke, they offer few glimpses of the beating heart at his core; consequently, I laughed at Orsino's follies but derived little satisfaction from his ultimate triumph.

Rocklyn fares a bit better, especially in her flirty moments before Viola, when the carefully cultivated façade melts away ("Excellently done," says Viola of Olivia's beauty, "if God did all") to reveal the green schoolgirl beneath.  As with most of the cast, though, I wanted her to push such moments further, to explore the extremes of these manic personalities.

This critique is particularly appropriate to the performances that make up the play's subplot—one of the funniest Shakespeare wrote—in which the unrulier members of  Olivia's household team up to humiliate her puritanical steward, Malvolio.  Malvolio is an absolute gem of a role, and Dave Gamble so perfectly captures the crusty exterior that masks his casual hypocrisies and his pretensions to greatness, to criticize his efforts seems ungrateful.  And yet ... it is a performance better suited to an intimate, indoor setting or even a film.  Gamble's nuanced line readings and expressions are upstaged by the capacious surroundings, and the unfortunate result is that Malvolio's antics are amusing more often than they are hilarious.

Similarly, Jared Mercier is merely dissolute rather than riotous as Malvolio's chief antagonist, the appropriately named Sir Toby Belch.  Sir Toby has recruited another "knight," the dull-witted Sir Andrew Aguecheek, to woo Olivia (and, we infer, to pick up Sir Toby's bar tabs); Brandon Mitchell plays Aguecheek as a country simpleton and gets a lot of mileage out of a Southern accent and a nonplussed grin.  They are joined in their schemes by Olivia's gentlewoman, Maria; Karen Novack's sharp-edged performance leaves no doubt that she is the brains of the operation.

Of these "lower" types, the most consistently funny performance comes from Steve Beall as Feste, Olivia's fool.  Beall, like Crooks, exudes confidence in his craft, and he strides across the wide stage like one who has mastered its unique dimensions.  Feste is Twelfth Night's primary source of witticisms and obscure puns—elucidating his many double meanings for a modern audience is never an easy task, and Beall rises admirably to the challenge; he also finds the poignancy (and darkness) in the great song that closes the show.

As much as any Shakespearean play, Twelfth Night is filled with music, and where the production sticks to Shakespeare's lyrics (deftly set to original music by CSC Associate Director Dan O'Brien), the songs are among the highlights of the evening.  It is when Leopold and Music Director Courtenay Moon attempt to "update" the show by alluding to more contemporary sounds that they lose their way—the occasional bursts of, as the program describes it, "incidental music from the 1960s" are jarring (I still haven't figured out what Sebastian and Antonio are doing in a guitar-mandolin combo), and the ensemble dance numbers that open and close the second act, while fun, seem gratuitous, as though Leopold wanted to give us all a break from Shakespeare while her cast does the Twist.

Indeed, the '60s motif that has been grafted onto aspects of the production design does not seem to have been fully considered.  Kristina Lambdin's debonair costumes seem more appropriate to the leisurely pursuits of the early-20^th century than to the restless energies of later decades, and nothing about the columned backdrop suggests the modern era.  This is not in itself a problem, mind you—Lambdin and scenic designer Heidi L. Castle-Smith have created a very effective design for the play Shakespeare wrote, which is why the scattered allusions to recent popular culture serve little purpose but to confuse.

These are small points, however, in the grand scheme of things.  Shakespearean comedy performed outdoors by a talented cast is an always-anticipated pleasure of summer, and this production of Twelfth Night more than delivers on those grounds.

Twelfth Night is playing at Patapsco Female Institute Historic Park, located at 3691 Sarah's Lane in Ellicott City, on Fridays and Saturdays at 8 PM and Sundays at 5 PM, through July 19^th.  There will also be one Thursday performance on July 16^th at 8 PM.  Tickets are $15-$30 and free for children under 18 when accompanied by a paying adult.  For more information, visit www.chesapeakeshakespeare.com or call  866-811-4111 .  Groups of 10 or more should call  410-31....