Twelfth Night

Abstract

Reviewed by: Twelfth Night Molly Beth Seremet Twelfth NightPresented by the American Shakespeare Center, Staunton, VA. 2020 SummerSafestart Season. 2507– 1810 2020. Directed by Dan Hasse. Costumes by Victoria Depew. With Mia Wurgaft (Viola/Sebastian), Zoe Speas (Viola/Sebastian), Brandon Carter (Orsino), Constance Swain (Olivia), Michael Manocchio (Malvolio), Chris Johnston (Feste), Jessika D. Williams (Antonio), John Harrell (Sir Toby Belch), Matthew Radford Davies (Fabian), Sarah Suzuki (Maria), Topher Embry (Sir Andrew Aguecheek), Danielle A. Festa (Valentine/Officer), Cat M. Thomas (Curio/Officer), and Sam Saint Ours (Musician) As part of what it heralded as its "Safestart Season," the American Shakespeare Center took over several stages in Summer 2020, launching two repertory productions inside the Blackfriars Playhouse and on the lawn at the nearby Blackburn Inn. In the midst of the strangeness of a global pandemic and subsequent closing of (nearly all of) the playhouses, the ASC became a theatrical oasis, succeeding in doing theater on the frontline. It was fitting, then, that one of the company's dual offerings in these tempestuous times was Twelfth Night, a play that opens with a catastrophic event that distances a woman from her twin, stranding them each amidst new friends, estranging them from their routines, and alienating them from the comfort that their physical proximity breeds. In a socially distant 2020, this Safestart Twelfth Nightshowcased an Illyria that realized the togetherness the audience was already longing for, with some bittersweet perspective on why closeness does not always feel the way we expect it to. This production highlighted estrangement in its use of a coin toss at the start of each performance to determine who would play Viola in each performance. To embed this gimmick into the play's dramaturgy, the cast gathered onstage together during pre-show to perform Ingrid Michaelson's song, "The Chain." The two actors, Zoe Speas and Mia Wurgaft, flipped a coin between them in a show of sibling camaraderie. They were dressed identically in white trousers and jackets, each inhabiting a [End Page 131]vaguely Sebastian-like masculine energy, jostling each other and hitting shoulders more like identical twin brothers might do. On the night I attended the show at the playhouse, Wurgaft won the toss and left immediately to don her woman's weeds. Accordingly, Speas took on the role of Sebastian, creating a dynamic in which the actors playing the roles of the play's central twins knew each other's inward parts as intimately as the characters themselves. Sebastian began the play, remaining onstage as the song concluded to flip his coin one last time before making way for Orsino's entrance. The similarities of these actors in terms of appearance, physical type, and energy invited a question about just how much chancethis choice-making engendered, however. On the one hand, it offered a glimpse into a world in which Sebastian and Viola might realistically be mistaken for one another, similar grains of sand irritating the tender flesh of Orsino's Illyrian oyster. On the other, the physical and energetic differences between these Violas were so slight that the ripples dissipated shortly after either Viola washed to shore, both outdoors at the Blackburn when I saw Speas take up Viola's mantle and inside the Playhouse when Wurgaft took her turn. In Shakespeare's play, by contrast, Viola and Sebastian encounter different Illyrias when they land. As Cesario, Viola is never quite "man" enough to avoid attention, causing Olivia's obsession, Aguecheek's pique, and Feste's gloom. By contrast, Sebastian's masculinity rests on him comfortably and affords him the opportunity to take advantage of both Antonio's and Olivia's interest casually and without too much self-examination. In passing as Cesario, the male-presenting avatar of his beloved sister, Sebastian compounds his male interest, and it pays out dividends by the play's end. Hasse's Safestart production took relatively few risks in terms of challenging Illyria's binaries. Instead, this production realized a world in which Viola and Sebastian were always already mutually interchangeable. Given the diversity of the acting company, it might have been interesting to put this device of deterministic doubled casting to...