Twelfth Night (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Twelfth Night John R. Ford Twelfth Night Presented by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival at the Octagon Stage, Montgomery, Alabama. March 12–July 23, 2006. Directed by Gavin Cameron Webb. Scenic Designer Bob Cothran. Dramaturg Susan Willis. Costume Designer Susan Branch. Scenic Painter Erin Brown. Lighting Designer Liz Lee. Composer Gregg Coffin. Sound Designer Jake Carter. Fight Choreographer Scot Mann. Voice and Dialect Coach Sarah Felder. Movement Coach Denise Gabriel. Stage Manager Sara Lee Howell. Production Assistant Michael Andrew Rodgers. Assistant Stage Manager Kimberly J. First. With Patrick Porter (Orsino), Anthony Reimer (Curio), John Michael Marrs (Valentine), Lauren Bloom (Viola), Chris Boyd (Sea Captain), Roger Forbes (Sir Toby Belch), Rebecca Koon (Maria), Duane Black (Sir Andrew Aguecheek), Joe Vincent (Feste), Merideth Kaye Clark (Olivia), Paul Hebron (Malvolio), Chris Boyd (Sir Topas, the Priest), Tim Gittings (Sebastian), Chris Mixon (Antonio), Mark Allan Jeter (Fabian), and others. The unifying concept of director Gavin Cameron-Webb's production of Twelfth Night at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival was one of excess. The term applied to every element—if that overworn word still serves—of the play, from the overwritten geography of Illryia itself to the high fantastical language of its inhabitants, to the self-conscious and willfully determined revelry, to the busy stage scenery that often impeded the unruly traffic of all that movement. As dramaturg Susan Willis commented in a pre-performance talk, even the number of lovers is excessive, far more than a happy ending requires or even tolerates. The setting, as well as the set, contributed to the climate of excess as well as to its limits. The extravagant Cavalier costumes of this production suggested the imminence of Puritan reform. The set also was richly detailed, its design somewhat insistently imposed on the intimate space of the Octagon Theater by scenic director Bob Cothran, working in the spirit of the aesthetic vision of sculptor Sergio Bustamante. Appropriate for a play so oddly conscious of time throughout its revelry, a large, ornamental clock-tower loomed above the playing space. One of two figures would emerge from that clock, its presence defining whether we were in Orsino's household or Olivia's. A woman holding a mirror signaled Olivia's house, while a man with crossed legs signaled Orsino's. Each symbol suggested a conventionally defined image—feminine vanity and Petrarchan unrequited desire—that the play itself would deconstruct with its variety of gender subversions. The stage itself consisted of two elevated mini-stages, accessed by a series of steps. The surface of each [End Page 77] was ornamented by a series of blue swirling shapes that, looked at one way, resembled the scalloped waves of the sea, but eyed in another, a fanned out peacock's tail. At the upstage boundary a stairway led up to multiple doorways. If the set emphasized the revelry of this play, it also suggested something of the wonder. No matter how riotous the action grew, we never lost an awareness of the presence of the sea or the unrelenting passage of time. When Orsino boldly announced that the capacity of his love "receiveth as the sea," those words were quite literally circumscribed by the iconography of a less rhetorical sea, whose tempests might or might not be kind. The rhythms of the sea also suggested the limiting and omnipresent awareness of time in the play. But time also announced itself musically. Amid all the raucous music of the reveling, one could hear the repeated chimes of the clock tower. We know, of course, that Illyria, surprisingly, has a clock, for Olivia tells Cesario/Viola that "the clock upbraids me with the waste of time." This production took that one reference to a clock and disseminated its chimes throughout the play. We heard them as Malvolio began to speculate on the benevolent powers of fortune. We heard the bells again as Sir Toby and Fabian turned the caterwauling up a notch, convincing Sir Andrew that he needed to awake his dormouse valor and challenge Cesario to a duel. The chimes occurred unexpectedly, of course. Especially given this production's Cavalier setting and costuming, the chimes had a way of reminding us of what was to come...