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The shows discussed here, brave and iconoclastic about sex, or mixing opera and cabaret, or presenting the opposition of plutocracy and philanthropy with theater piece tools, remind us how vital it is that the theater keep on giving us things we haven’t seen before, might not be comfortable watching, things that stun us and surprise us. I would go so far as to say that if theater ever stops giving us edgy work, it will cease to be theater. Here’s to edgy.
The inspired choice at the heart of this beautiful realization of Shakespeare’s vision in Twelfth Night is the creation of Illyria, the neverland in which Shakespeare set the play. There was no Illyria in Shakespeare’s time, and really had been no such nation since Roman times. Whatever Shakespeare was going for, it was not constricted by any realities contemporary to him. This meant that director Gavin Witt was free in turn to fashion something that in 21st-Century terms would correspond to Shakespeare’s fantasy. And what he presents is a kind of amalgam of the Marx Brothers’ Freedonia and the Warner Brothers’ Casablanca. There are slinky evening gowns you might see at Rick’s Café Americain. There is a hat that echoes a fez. There is an outfit like a Greek soldier’s. Sebastian and Viola wear plus-fours and Norfolk jackets, topped with newsboy hats. The costumes, by designer David Burdick, all fit together and, together with the set by Josh Epstein which suggests a colonnaded white town overlooking the Adriatic (locus of the ancient Illyria), convey a world between the two World Wars. It is at once idyllic and dangerous.
Many of Shakespeare’s comedies are essentially love delivery vehicles, giddy confections that give the audience an extraordinarily broad license just to roll in the bliss of it. I think especially ofTwelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But the most love-mad of all is surely As You Like It. And thankfully, that love-mad champagne feeling is served up nearly full-force in the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company’s latest rendering of the play.
Eventually Gil wins the struggle for the right to define his mother’s obsequies. He is handed the urn with her ashes. He has sole custody. But then what? The second half of the play answers that question. It turns out that while Gil doesn’t have the answer, Mo does. It involves a car chase down I-95 and the Cinderella Castle Suite at Disneyland, and a vision of Adelaide dancing in a magical white dress, and fireworks.
We get not only the female orgasm (a given, in light of the subtitle) but childbirth, lactation, lesbianism, the discontent Betty Friedan called the feminine mystique, the loss of children, the way medicine approaches the female body, and the contents and discontents of heterosexual intercourse. And thrown in for good measure are many aspects of the social relations of men and women. The whole discourse is carefully disguised as a drawing-room comedy shot through, particularly at the end, with Marquezian magical realism.
I lived in London and Vienna before coming to the United States, and grew up mainly in Ann Arbor. I was writing plays and stories as early as grade school. My undergraduate years at the University of Pennsylvania, where I first reviewed theater, for the college paper, were succeeded by graduate study at the Johns Hopkins University, where I earned a doctorate in English Literature.
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When you submit your email below, you'll receive emails from me with notificaitons of new theater reviews posted to this site, along with announcements about my plays, including my forthcoming book.