Theatre in Review: Twelfth Night (Public Theatre/Shakespeare in the Park)

	Audra McDonald and Anne Hathaway. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare's bipolar plays -- a romantic comedy with a strong undertone of melancholy, a farce hinged on a practical joke that climaxes in an act of flagrant cruelty. It ends in a reconciliation scene to which not everyone is invited. Given these mixed moods, it is, more than most of his works, subject to an infinite number of interpretations. Not to get all Shakespearean on you, but I've seen versions that were pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral -- and that's just for starters. Daniel Sullivan's staging at the Delacorte is a deft balancing act, giving each of the play's emotional colors its due, and providing a playground for an unusually starry cast.

That playground, as designed by John Lee Beatty, is a series of rolling hills covered with lush green grass and dotted by rows of spindly saplings. It serves as both a park where mismatched lovers meet and a memorial garden where mourners weep. Chief among the latter is Audra McDonald's Olivia, the countess who has retreated from the world following the deaths of her father and brother. Most Olivias are ostentatiously teary -- usually comically so; McDonald makes her quietly furious at the world for the misfortunes that have befallen her, draping herself in black as an act of defiance. She's especially fed up with the cloying attentions of men like Orsino (Raúl Esparza, Byronic in dress and manner), the duke who woos her neither wisely nor too well.

McDonald's no-nonsense approach pays surprising dividends. Orsino takes in Viola (Anne Hathaway), the shipwrecked gentlewoman who has disguised herself as a man, then sends her to plead his case with Olivia. It all goes horribly wrong, as Olivia slips from supercilious resignation to giddy infatuation -- with the panic-stricken Viola. McDonald's idiotic smile of adoration, as she abandons her stately reserve to chase after her newfound love, provides this Twelfth Night with some of its biggest laughs.

Until fairly late, however, the scenes involving the play's mixed-up romantic quartet -- the fourth is Stark Sands as Sebastian, Viola's twin brother -- have a distinctly melancholic undertone. Everyone is driven by love, but they're also aware of its fickle and transitory nature. You see it in how Esparza's Duke turns the play's opening lines ("If music be the food of love, play on") into an enraged command instead of a lament or a romantic pose. It's there when Hathaway's Viola touches her own breast tentatively after Orsino has given her a friendly man-to-man tap. And it's palpable when a jester's attempt at consoling Olivia takes a dangerous turn -- he reasonably points out that if she mourns her brother so much, he must be in hell; otherwise she would be glad to know he is in heaven -- revealing the depths of the lady's rage. That jester, Feste, is played by David Pittu, and his thoughtful rendition of the song "O Mistress Mine" -- with the refrain "Youth's a stuff will not endure" -- seems particularly appropriate here.

As the show progresses, however, the lovers make way for the clowns, led by Olivia's neurasthenic would-be wooer Andrew Aguecheek, here brought to thoroughly hilarious life by Hamish Linklater. Dressed in a yellow suit that makes him look like an oversize canary, sporting long blond locks that he flips about girlishly when not striking poses of manly grace that end in steep pratfalls, and given to fixating on irrelevant points like someone who has smoked one too many marijuana joints, Linklater's Andrew is the perfect would-be fop, delivering his lines in a stoner monotone that exposes everything he says as pure idiocy. ("Beef does harm to my wit," he notes, explaining his lack of affect.) From the minute he enters, kicking over an urn filled with a loved one's ashes, he very nearly runs off with the entire show. "I'm a fellow of the strangest mind in the world," he says, and truer words were never spoken.

Adding to the fun is Jay O. Sanders' Sir Toby Belch, Olivia's boisterous, wine-soaked uncle ("It's too late to go to bed now," he asserts, eyeing the stage for another bottle as a night of drunken revelry ends at dawn), and Julie White as Maria, Toby's partner in crime, cackling in glee in anticipation of a planned prank on Malvolio, Olivia's pretentious steward. Michael Cumpsty, dressed in black and sporting a mop of unruly red locks, is a more restrained, less menacing Malvolio than usual, although his doomed attempts at wooing Olivia generate as many laughs as Olivia's hapless attempts at winning over Viola.

What with all these cutups on the loose, Esparza's handsome and well-spoken Orsino gets a bit lost in the shuffle; the same is true of Sands' Sebastian. As Viola, Hathaway's relative lack of stage experience is detectable; she even muffs the play's most surefire laugh line ("I am the man," spoken when Viola realizes in horror that she has accidentally captivated Olivia); at the same time, she's far from being a Hollywood dilettante. She looks terrific, has a sly comic sense -- especially when she's trying to pass herself off as a butch number in front of Orsino -- and she enjoys a real rapport with McDonald, especially when fending off Olivia's increasingly overt advances.

All in all, Sullivan's direction has a sharp eye for understated comic detail, when Toby piously crosses himself, his whiskey bottle firmly in hand, or, at the end, when Orsino, unable to tell Viola and Sebastian apart, accidentally picks the wrong sibling for an embrace. And everyone looks great in Jane Greenwood's Regency-era costumes, with empire-line skirts that flatter the women, and long waistcoats and tall boots for the men. I loved Sir Toby's enormous Napoleon hat, and Malvolio's famous appearance in yellow stockings and cross garters is as ridiculous as anyone would want.

The lovely keening bagpipes and mournful incidental melodies provided by Hem are especially well-served by Acme Sound Partners. There were technical problems with the lighting on the night I attended -- the side light dropped out for a while -- so I hesitate to comment on Peter Kaczorowski's design, although I will note that he seems to be going for a more sculptural look than one usually sees in the Delacorte. (Overall, the performance I attended had a slight stop-and-start quality, thanks to the inclement weather; the cast deserves some kind of award for soldiering on in the least felicitous of circumstances without showing the least sign of strain.)

This production's double vision reaches its fulfillment in the final scene in which all secrets are revealed and the paired lovers are serenaded with the oddly introspective final song (the lyric "Gor the rain it raineth every day" is especially meaningful in Central Park these nights). At the same time, the tableau is punctuated by a series of departures -- by Sir Toby, Maria, and Malvolio, among those who haven't been invited to the feast. It's a powerful reminder of the sadness at the heart of one of Shakespeare's feistiest comedies. Cheers to Sullivan and company for providing three hours of civilized amusement.--David Barbour