Twelfth Night Propeller, March 17–April 1, 2007

Shakespeare's original London theater audiences were accustomed to seeing boy actors play the female roles. And, while audience members were never completely unaware that they were watching cross-dressed males, they were presumably able to suspend their disbelief enough to become imaginatively absorbed in the story being played before them. It can be difficult today for an all-male company to elicit such imaginative engagement, since the modern theater audience has not been conditioned to ignore the gender of the actors. It is far from an impossible task, though, as demonstrated by Propeller's recent production of Twelfth Night, directed by Edward Hall and designed by Michael Pavelka for the Watermill Theatre in Berkshire, UK, and imported to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in March 2007. Often, attempts at the all-male presentation of early modern drama fail to engage the audience imaginatively because, by attempting to present male actors convincingly as women—through costuming, makeup, and acting style—the effort itself to achieve verisimilitude becomes the focus of a modern audience that is already distracted by the novelty of the gender reversals. The degree of attention the production pays to the unfamiliar convention correspondingly heightens the audience's awareness of that convention's strangeness, and leads spectators to measure not how convincingly the male actors inhabit their female roles, but how far they fall short in doing so.

Propeller circumvented this difficulty by making no gesture whatsoever toward verisimilitude in its presentation of female characters. Tam Williams's Viola had short hair and showed no awkwardness in adopting the persona of the male Cesario. Chris Myles, as Maria, flaunted a balding scalp and abundant chest hair in his "cleavage," and made minor, unobtrusive use of feminine gesture; he also spoke in his natural voice, lending an added humor to the coy Maria's flirtations with Toby and Aguecheek. Dugald Bruce-Lockhart, as Olivia, while somewhat more feminine in gesture than Myles, spoke also in his own voice, had short cropped hair, and wore makeup that belonged more to a drag-queen mode than to any attempt at realistic femininity. The lack of attention paid to persuading the audience that these male actors were women actually managed to be simultaneously convincing and transparent: the spectator was enabled to both forget and remain aware of the fact that the actors were men.

It would not be unreasonable to suppose that this sort of double-awareness was the experience of Shakespeare's original audiences; and, by reproducing that experience, the Propeller production was able to exploit dramatic possibilities written into Shakespeare's text that could not be reached any other way. There are, for instance, unexpected dynamics of sexual tension that emerge in the play. When Maria engages, on the diegetic level, in erotically charged banter with the two male revelers (Jason Baughan as Toby and Simon Scardifield as Aguecheek), a homoerotic tension also develops on the actor level—a tension that parallels the homoerotic element of Toby and Aguecheek's companionship (on the diegetic level), which was emphasized in this production by the abundance of physical horseplay between the two. Likewise, Olivia's attraction to Cesario carries a different degree of irony when the implied female homoeroticism on the character level (Olivia falling in love with Viola) is juxtaposed with the actor-level male homoeroticism in the relationship between Olivia (Bruce-Lockhart) and Viola's twin brother Sebastian (Joe Flynn), which was heavily sexualized in this production (at one point, Sebastian stood nude before Olivia in her bedroom).

If the cross-dressing was thus played down for heightened dramatic effect, other elements of the production were camped up to an extent that seemed incompatible with such nuanced characterization. This issue arose, for example, in Malvolio's cross-gartering scene, where the steward, suddenly grown into an oversexed, social-climbing paramour, donned little more than an oversized yellow codpiece and silver spangles. But by far the most memorable—and unnecessary—use of camp humor was the staging of the farcical swordfight between Cesario and Aguecheek. This comedic encounter was translated into an overblown boxing match...