By Bruce Chadwick
originally published: 12/11/2022
I went to see William Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night on Saturday, the tenth day of December. Maybe that was an omen.
Twelfth Night, one of Shakespeare’s romances, is set it the area of Illyria, which I think is next to Delaware. It’s the story of love, unrequited love (you ever figure out what unrequited love actually is? I think it’s all those girls I met in college who did not want to meet me.)
It is the story of a woman whose brother, we think, has died. It is one of his troubled plots with happy ending plays.
Twelfth Night, not staged that often, is a new step for the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, at Drew University, in Madison, where it opened December 7th.
There is much good to be said of it. The acting, as an example, is simply superb, really impressive. Those with major roles and those with minor roles are equally good. They have their characters fully developed in the first fifteen minutes of the play and get better as it goes on. The direction by Jason King Jones is wonderful. He has his actors portray each scene majestically. He holds the direction of the play in his talented hands and does as fine job of presenting the play as well as it can be presented. The simple set, by set designer Brittany Vasta, is extremely usable, and incredibly impressive. The costumes are wildly colorful and haul you up on to the stage and into the early 1600s yourself.
It has its sad moments, but it is a happy play. Twelfth Night is full of comedy, led by an uproariously funny performance by Patrick Toon as Andrew. You can’t miss him. His arms are always flailing away like a windmill. Another marvelous and very funny character is Malvolio, alternately stern and hilarious. He is the center of a wildly funny subplot in which someone plants a love letter to him and a gang a mischief makers watch him as he reads it. The people who wrote I Love Lucy could not have topped this brilliant scene.
All of the actors in the play do fine work. Among them are Jeffrey Marc Alkins as Sebastian, Jon Barker as Duke Orsino, Jeffrey M. Bender as Sir Toby Belch, Robert Cuccioli as Malvolio, Tarah Flanagan as Maria, Eliana Rowe as Viola and Billie Watt as Olivia. The rest of the cast does fine work, too.
Throughout the play, there are questions about whether women and playing men or men playing women. You need to look hard at the characters, but even that does not help much. Here, there is little of that. Or is it little of that?
There is something for everybody in the play, even a short and sweet musical concert right in the middle of it.
The actors, for the most part, are a happy crew in a happy story with a sort of happy end.
Twelfth Night has some problems, though. First, It should have been re-named Thirteenth Night to give the Bard an extra night to straighten out a real puzzling jigsaw of a story. From start to finish, sitting in the audience, you cannot figure out where the play is going, Second, there really is no main character with a main story. There are a number of secondary characters, strong secondary characters, but no central figure on whom to hang the story. This is troublesome right from the start. It seems like every ten minuets there is a new lead character. The plot is frazzled – again, every ten minutes there is a new central character and new story. It’s like a merry—go-round.
Twelfth Night should have been straightened out by Shakespeare, as he straightened out so many of his plays. There is an old saying that in a good play you, in the audience can see yourself. Well, in Twelfth Night I could not see myself, not my friend who lives down the hall or any of the folks in my building or the next building, either.
Overall? This is a good play with some bumps in its road. Appreciate the good things and overlook the bad. It’s like going to school when you were a kid. School was sometimes great, sometimes OK and sometimes, oh my God!
Just hang in there!
Twelfth Night will continue at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey through January 1, 2023.
Photos by Sarah Haley
About the author:
Bruce Chadwick worked for 23 years as an entertainment writer/critic for the New York Daily News. Later, he served as the arts and entertainment critic for the History News Network, a national online weekly magazine. Chadwick holds a Ph. D in History and Cultural Studies from Rutgers University. He has written 31 books on U.S. history and has lectured on history and culture around the world. He is a history professor at New Jersey City University.
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