Review: TWELFTH NIGHT at Connecticut Repertory Theater

Fast-paced and funny is what the production of TWELFTH NIGHT at UConn's Connecticut Repertory Theater is going for, it seems. The text has been significantly cut so that running time is just barely two hours, and the antic clowning in the show works well. What's missing is the heart, and since this is a play about love--misplaced love, often--that's too bad.

Guest director Victor Moag was recently listed by American Theatre Magazine as one of "20 Theater Workers to Watch." Here, he's working with a diverse cast that includes just two Equity actors (Richard Ruiz as Sir Toby Belch and Andrew Ramcharan Guilarte as Malvolio) and a slew of undergraduate and graduate actors from the professional training track. He's succeeded in getting rollicking comic performances from his band, with lots of physical humor, using aisles and handrails as well as the simple set.

He's aided in this by effective eclectic costuming for his clowns, who are also up to the musical demands of this show. The fool Feste (played by undergraduate Kevin Hilversum) is in red and yellow clown shoes and a red three coned wig, with ripped jeans, red suspenders, and a ragged ruff. Sir Toby, drunken ringleader of the revelers, wears a Santa hat and green stripes, checks and tassles. His rotundness contrasts delightfully with gangly Sir Andrew Aguecheek (grad student Mark Blashford), who is the most fun of all to watch, and who also plays a mean banjo.

MFA design candidate Tuoxi Wu has devised wonderfully silly getups for the clowns, but the looks she's saddled the central triangle of lovers with serve them poorly. Undergraduate Juliana Bearse plays Viola, the shipwrecked maiden who copies her brother's garb when she goes into disguise as a boy-but the outfit and wig are ill-fitting and rob her of the necessary charm. In her new identity as Cesario, she goes to work for the lovesick Count Orsino (graduate actor Darren Lee Brown), who promptly sends her to woo the Countess Olivia (undergraduate Madison Coppola) on his behalf. Olivia, who is in exaggerated mourning for her brother and her father, has no interest in Orsino but falls instantly for Viola/Cesario.

It's this sudden rapture that is the crux of the play, and where the best productions of TWELFTH NIGHT manage to shift into the sublime from the ridiculous. Such abrupt and temporary tone shifts-both via insertion of comic bits in tragedies, and genuine probing of human emotion within comedies-demand a great deal from a director and actors, but they are essential to Shakespeare's genius.

This production never attempts that leap, resorting instead to exaggerated costumes, overwrought actions and mustache gimmicks. As a result, we never really come to care whether the various lovers eventually find resolution. With that lapse, much of the potential grandeur of this great comedy is lost.

Similarly, the subplot involving spoilsport Malvolio, who is punished rather cruelly by the clown team for getting in the way of their fun, is sketched in rather than plumbed to any depth. This is so despite the fact that Guilarte gives a strong performance in the role of the Puritan functionary who harbors a secret, forbidden love for his mistress.

Kudos go to undergraduate scenic designer Brett Calvo, who has given us three levels of artifice in his simple but arresting set. There are two rolling topiary Christmas trees, decorated with baubles, that provide hiding spots for the famous letter scene. Behind them are two large flats, screen printed with the outline of trees, in two dimensions. These part to reveal an actual bare tree, hung upside down. Much is suggested by these juxtapositions: the topsy-turvy reversals of normalcy in the status world, as well as the ways in which we humans attempt to simplify nature on the one hand and control it on the other. I wish that the production itself took up these kinds of ideas more fully. The best Shakespearean comedies weave insight together with silliness; that potential is untapped in this show.

Runs at the Connecticut Repertory Theater are short: this production closes on December 13.

Photo by Gerry Goodstein

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