There are a good many reasons to spend time sitting in the green amphitheater of Austin Gardens on a fine midsummer evening, even if you’re not a fan of William Shakespeare, even if you don’t like a particular play.
Fortunately, Twelfth Night was a good one.
Festival Theatre’s Sunday performances, which start an hour earlier (7 p.m.), feature late-day sunlight splashed against the trees that overtower the stage, with cicadas howling like a Greek chorus. The Park District of Oak Park, Festival’s longtime sponsor, in honor of this, their 50th season of outdoor Shakespeare, gifted the troupe a new LED lighting system — which wasn’t need in the first act, but worked to beautiful effect in the second when night finally fell.
The spell of an Austin Gardens evening extends beyond the stage with fireflies pulsing like fairies in the enchanted forested backdrop and actors appearing and disappearing from every direction. The lovely pastel blue and orange stage with Mediterranean tiled floor glows in the LED-lit deep dark, allowing any avid suspender of disbelief to enter this Elizabethan universe, filled with Greek gods and magical “elephants … excrements … elements!” (as Sir Toby articulates it during his drunken revelry).
But enough of the setting. Let’s get down to business, which begins with a casket ominously stationed in the middle of the stage, holding the brother of the grief-stricken Olivia (Madison Kiernan) and the Duke of Orsino (Evan Ozer) launching the script with the famous, never fully explained, first line: “If music be the food of love, play on.”
What stingy audience could begrudge them anything after a beginning like that? A shipwreck ensues and a young woman, saved from the waves, dresses as a young man, disguised for her safety, grieving her presumed-lost identical twin brother. Shakespeare loved his cross-dressing, cross-gendered, cross-gartered, star-crossed tales of mistaken identity, and Festival Theatre has long been a gender-neutral zone, so make of all this “What You Will” as the Bard subtitled his airy frivolity.
You have to work hard to take this play seriously, so it’s best to surrender early and go with the frolicking flow. Shakespeare typically constructed his plays with parallel plot lines, nobles and ignobles, a kind of theatrical Upstairs/Downstairs, one stuffy and serious, the other bawdy and earthy, seeking some cosmic balance.
In this production the emphasis is inverted as the commoners steal the show. Festival mainstay Kevin Theis has a ball playing the aptly named Sir Toby Belch (whose inebriation is a tour de burps, so to speak). Theis long ago established his dramatic chops, but here he proves a gifted comic, complemented nicely by his character’s foil, the pompous-assed Puritan, yellow-stockinged and cross-gartered like no Malvolio in the history of Shakespearean productions, portrayed with no-holds-barred gusto by Josh Carpenter.
The play works its way through a confused love triangle and resolves in a happy-ever-after quadrangle, just as you like it, as you would have if you scripted it yourself, but the plot devices are fueled by the “wise fools” and why not? Shakespeare’s playful wit doesn’t elicit nearly the laughs that J. Cody Hunt’s Sir Andrew Aguecheek (possibly the Bard’s best name ever) generates during his pathetic (but well-choreographed) attempt at a swordfight — accompanied by ample giggles from the kids in the audience.
Kudos to director Peter Andersen (Festival’s new artistic director as well), for better pacing and modulation on the delivery of lines, which is my pet peeve about Shakespeare plays that don’t trust their audiences to handle the silences and pauses that quality acting is heir to. One of the brighter young talents, Ama Kuwonu (as Viola/Cesario), did succumb to the infamous Shakespearean shouting trap as her voice grew hoarse in the second half — unnecessary since the sound system is much improved, rendering voices fully audible.
But that’s quibbling. The well-oiled chicanery, pratfalls, slapstick, tomfoolery and buffoonery finds greatness thrust upon it (another famous line hiding here), achieving midsummer night madness, nonsense at its noblest. Comedy has always been Festival’s forte — and, in some ways, also Shakespeare’s, who elevates our highest aspirations and wallows in our lowest common denominator with equal fervor. There are no villains here, only the pompous, tumbling off their pedestals, fools and wise fools on parade.
Comedy, they say, is hard, but Festival and the Bard make seriously silly look easy. It is their gift.
Do look this gift horse in the mouth (not Shakespeare). Go and see Twelfth Night some enchanted evening soon.
Four weeks left in Festival Theatre’s production of ‘Twelfth Night.’ Performances are Thursdays through Sundays (plus two Wednesdays) through Saturday, Aug. 16, starting at 8 p.m. (7 p.m. on Sundays). For tickets, visit oakparkfestival.com