Twelfth Night

[avram]

Today I saw Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in Central Park. This makes the fifth of the free park Shakespeare performances I’ve seen, the others being Timon of Athens, Cymbeline, Julius Cæsar, and A Winter’s Tale.

First the group had planned to meet at the park to wait on line for tickets, but they’ve instituted a new rule: You have to get on the back of the line, you can’t join with a friend who’s already on line. Erik got there pretty early, around 10 AM, so he got a good spot, while Lisa and Josh got there around 11, and were much farther back. I got there at 12:45. But Matt had already cancelled, leaving us with a total of six people (the four of us, plus Chris and Beth) to get tickets for, and since each person can claim two tickets, we had enough for everyone if Lisa and Josh got in. And they did, so we did. The new system meant that Erik’s two tickets were nowhere near Lisa and Josh’s four tickets, so if you want your group to sit together you have to all show up together.

Tickets secured at around 1:30 PM, we needed to kill a few hours till they started letting people in (7:30). We met up with Beth in front of Big Nick’s, had a nosh, then hung out at Barnes & Noble for a while. I picked up Sean Stewart’s Galveston (finally out in mass-market paperback) and China Miéville’s The Scar (trade paper, and it’s set in the same world as Perdido Street Station). I also spent some time looking over the bewildering variety of Star Trek novels, including a Star Trek: The Next Generation crossover with The X-Men. I shit you not.

At around 6:00 we had dinner at a Japanese place where everyone but Erik went for the all-you-can-eat sushi. (This may have been a bad choice on Erik’s part, as he later went home during the play’s intermission, saying he felt sick.)

We got back to the Delacourt Theatre at 7:30, and hung around a while waiting for Chris, who never showed. Josh tried calling her a couple of times, but her line was busy. We figured she’d opted out, and went in.

It was a good production. Twelfth Night is a comedy, and this production really played in for laughs. There were lots of hilarious physical routines, and Christopher Lloyd made a great Malvolio. The production also had an interesting homoerotic moment (in Act 3, Scene 3) where Antonio, giving Sebastiano his purse, comes up behind him, embraces him, and slowly sticks the purse into Sebastiano’s shirt. The two linger for a moment, then break away and deliver the last lines of the scene quickly, as if embarrassed. Appropriate, given all of Antonio’s talk of love and jealousy, and given what‘s going on in the rest of the play, with a woman falling for another woman dressed as a man who loves another man and all that.

The set was also very odd. It was shaped like a wave, with a flat area near the audience, swooping up to a near vertical towards the back. At the opening of the play there’s a wrecked ship suspended on the wave, with carpets and pillows spilling out. Later the ship moves down, and eventually it gets covered with roses and surrounded by crates (arranged like stairs) and becomes much less ship-like. But this set provided a really cool way for characters to get onstage. In addition to entering through the two ramps at the front (shown at the bottom left of my sketch), and walking in from the back (at the right of my sketch), they also slid down on carpets from the top! Lots of fun to watch. Usually they slid sitting or laying or crouching on all fours, but at one point Antonio (usually played by Sterling K. Brown, my program says, but tonight he was performed by David Harbour) surfed down standing. He got an ovation for that.

All the comic actors were good, but Michael Stuhlbarg was especially funny as Andrew Aguecheek, and I think this actor also played the Shepherd’s Son in A Winter’s Tale.

Comments

[mamishka.livejournal.com]

That's so cool. I love funky sets and when actors get to have fun with a play. ;-) Clearly I need to get out more.

[avram]

These folks (the Joseph Papp Public Theater) often do nifty things with the sets. This one was especially cool, but it did lead to some distracting speculation about when the ship was a ship and when it was just, say, part of someone's house.

[baldanders.livejournal.com]

Boy, I wish more places would adopt that line policy.

[avram]

Yeah, we were grumbling about how inconvenient it was, but had to admit it was for the best. I wish we'd known about it in advance, but I don't know if I'd have been able to get my ass out of bed early to get there by 10 anyway.