Great Lakes Shakespeare

Abstract

and mysterious incompleteness is an essential, if puzzling, part of the play. Ceballos' rather quiet Malvolio played off of Orsino's melancholy incompleteness. Malvolio's melancholy was willful, his love for Olivia aggressive and aggrandizing. The troupe attempted to emphasize the Mal in Malvolio's name, to indicate that he was the bad opposite of Viola and Olivia. For him, the play ended on a down beat. Ceballos felt the character comparable to Moliere's Alceste, the dissident voice that keeps the comedy honest. Maria (Torry Cavanagh), Sir Toby Belch (David Meyer), and Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Steve Black) boisterously parodied the more serious action. Meyer's Belch was nicely modulated; Black's Sir Andrew was comically fatuous. Joe Mock as Feste played the low-life parallel to Viola. The mysterious Fabian in this production was merely a fellow servant (Matt Diehl). By resisting the possibilities for limitless slapstick and innovation, Hutton achieved a rare balance. The villains below stairs may have had more fun than the lovesick Orsino and his Illyrian aristocrats, but they did not entirely steal the show. The relationship between Sebastian (played by Hutton himself) and Antonio (Richard Kuhlman) was fascinatingly ambivalent. Their first scene began with a physical struggle-playful, but with swords drawn. The violence in the relationship was barely submerged. Kuhlman's Antonio was Sebastian's peer, perhaps a substitute brother, but basically a loner, a daring swashbuckler. His homosexual attraction to Sebastian was only fleetingly suggested. In fact, the homosexual implications throughout the play-Olivia's love for the disguised Viola, Orsino's growing attraction for his apparently male page-were kept at a discreet distance from the play's surface. Again, Hutton's instincts were for modulation and balance rather than for absolute or explicit statement. Romer's Orsino and Hutton's Sebastian remained shadowy figures; throughout the play they inhabited a purely masculine world, living with loss, dealing with melancholy. For Hutton as director, these characters must have seemed symbols for the entire action of a play that underscores human inconstancy in a non-rational world where nothing is stable-from the initial shipwreck to Viola's final unveiling and Orsino's rapid shift of affection. Hutton's production caught, quite beautifully, a world where nothing is what it seems to be. All in all, this was an extremely successful first season. Although the texts were cut, the cutting was done to emphasize the story line, and though some of the subtleties were lost, there was a vigorous adherence to getting Shakespeare's plays across to a general, rather than sophisticated, audience. For a young troupe, this was a superb accomplishment.