Twelfth Night
by William Shakespeare
Town & Gown Players, 1990-91 season
For this I skipped a translators' conference in New Jersey.
I got a good part in my first Town & Gown show: Toby Belch. John's reduced casting put Toby, Sir Andrew and Maria together for most scenes (no Adrian or whatever his name is), which meant I was continually exposed to Shannon's gags and the astounding comedy bits of one of the Steves. (Town & Gown always has Steves in abundance; this was the English one.) I was young and impressionable, and the treatment took: Since the spring of 1991 I've worked on seventy-nine shows, all but a handful with T&G. And 80 and 81 are in the works now.
A few of us old-timers remember portly veteran English actor Sebastian Cabot, who spent 20-odd years on stage and had an overnight success in some American TV show about adorable children, but few of us have actually worn one of his costumes. Harriet found only one piece that was even close to fitting me, a Roman soldier's tunic with those dart thingies hanging down. The waist fell in one of the many places where mine didn't, though, so she tacked the darts together about halfway down. Wondering how such an odd-sized piece came to be, I looked at the label; Western Costume had made the tunic to Mr. Cabot's measure, then surplused it after the episode where he played, um, a Roman soldier. How it made its way to Athens, no one knows. But I was there and I saw it.
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Twelfth Night