Twelfth Night
by William Shakespeare
Atlanta Shakespeare Company at the Shakespeare Tavern, Atlanta
Ooops! The show closed on June 29, Year 3. Oh well, you may find some good stuff in the notes anyway.
First, how do you get to the Shakespeare Tavern once it reopens in August? You go to Atlanta via Interstate 75 or 85, take the 10th Street exit from the Downtown Connector, hook over to Peachtree Street and head downtown. A couple of blocks past North Avenue you cross Linden Street. In that block, on your left, is a big green parking sign. They have the most complicated payment system in the known world. Begin by reading the instructions on the front of the machine. Press any button and you'll hear a pleasant Indian lady telling you what to do. The attendant will now come and work the engine for you, which is your only hope. You walk past the nudie bar and there's the tavern, easy as that.
And why should you go? Twelfth Night closed before I even had a chance to write these notes, and the company is on hiatus till late August. So what you should do is visit the web site, take in the implausible plan for their 15th anniversary season—five comedies in rep, then five history plays ("the first miniseries in English literature"), and another five shows to round it off—and then get in line for your ticket, because the company is really doing some good stuff.
This Twelfth Night, for example, has many charms. Laura Cole, playing Viola/Cesario, has good bones. You will never believe she is a boy, but think about it: You don't have to believe she is a boy. Orsino (Brik Berkes) has to believe she is a boy, and with his soap-opera presence (olive skin, husky voice, suggestion of product in hair) you won't think he is too smart to believe that. Jennifer Akin as Olivia begins a conventional performance but brings this raucous, hungry voice when she gets an eyeful of Cesario. Hugh Adams gives Malvolio a clinician's notebook full of twitches.
The Tavern makes a fascinating performance space. It's the same for every show: half-thrust stage with a lowered apron, three doors, balcony, some steps. They can dress it a little, but they don't get much from that and often they don't even try. Doing away with sets means that the action never has to stop for scene changes. You might take this for a constraint—how do you tell the duke's court from the street that runs in front?—but anyone who's worked out this kind of staging will know that it means freedom, freedom, freedom. Designers too often don't give the audience any scope to help invent the show. Not a problem at the Tavern. And there's no food and beverage service during the performance, so you don't have to put up with dinner-theater noise.
It wasn't just the space that put this production over, though. Director Jeff Watkins put together a cast that may be a cut above the company's average. Maurice Ralston made Toby Belch younger and a little more coherent than most, and Melanie Walker as Maria had juice. Marc McPherson cast new light on Sir Andrew Aguecheek. I wonder whether directors don't take the text too seriously in casting this part: They get the tall and gawky and dim but often miss the part about Andrew being a clown. McPherson is a clown, start to finish, with a neat sideline in knee-walking drunk.
Two points I can't separate: the Fool and the music. As Jeff McKerley plays Feste, he lives near the surface of reality but touches it only at odd moments. When he does, more often than not it is in a song (music by Bo Ketchin, accomplished guitar accompaniment by Patrick Wood). McKerley doesn't burden you with jesting; you know Feste is enjoying the gags, so you enjoy them too. And it is quite a touching moment when Malvolio—bound in the dark at the darkest moment in the comedy—gets through to the Fool, who comforts everybody with a lullaby.
It's a Tavern tradition that the cast isn't uniformly brilliant. (At least they no longer have that mascot guy from back in the 80s.) This one, like the production as a whole, had enough brilliance to satisfy. Twelfth Night made a good evening of theater.
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Twelfth Night