Twelfe Night, Or What You Will (review)

For his first Shakespeare production at Seattle Repertory Theatre since being appointed artistic director in 2006, David Esbjornson staged a whimsical, sardonic Twelfe Night, Or What you Will (Folio spelling) that touched many corners of this opalesque play. Esbjornson and Michael Pavelka turned to the luminous colors and imaginary landscapes of the American painter Maxfield Parrish (1870–1966) for a wonderfully evocative set. Among Parrish's better known works is "The Dinky Bird" (from his illustrations for Eugene Field's 1904 book Poems of Childhood) in which an androgynous nude figure swings high above a fantasy castle set among billowing blue and yellow clouds. Esbjornson and Pavelka doubled Parrish's swinging figure; as the curtain opened, Viola and Sebastian, suspended on cables, "swam" high above the stage, as if against an imagined current, against a background of Parrish's blue and yellow clouds and steep, rugged mountains rising stage right. Beneath them sprawled Pavelka's imaginative seacoast: long parallel planks, raised higher stage left, curled down and across nearly the entire stage, mimicking the motions of waves rolling towards the shore. Center stage behind these planks, but in front of the mountains, stood a huge stone pillar with a large opening at its base through which Viola and the Captain entered in 1.2 and in which several characters stood to speak, including Orsino to pronounce his love melancholy in 1.1, Malvolio to reprimand the revelers in 2.5, and later Feste in 5.1 when he chastised Malvolio. Near the top of this pillar the solid stone gave way to fragmented, horizontal slats, suggesting perhaps tumbling waves; perhaps a huge broken oar from Viola's shipwreck; and perhaps, symbolically, the sheer force of time that withers even stone, as in Leonardo's The Virgin of the Rocks, where the formidable rocks of the foreground fade gradually into ragged shards. Whatever Pavelka's intent with this pillar, with the sheer, jagged mountains and the restless sea rolling stage left to right, this was a Twelfe Night brilliantly ensconced in the Pacific Northwest!

As Viola and Sebastian labored to swim towards the audience at the "edge" of the sea, David Pichette, a fidgety, frisky, sardonic, motley-clad Feste sang the melancholic song that he would repeat at play's end to bring 'round the whirligig of time's revenges. At song's end, as if introducing players in his own "improbable fiction," he ushered in Orsino, who bellowed to the reverberate hills his sense-less love-longing from inside time's pillar. Cheyenne Casebier, who would emerge in 3.1 as a ravishingly beautiful Olivia in a low cut, black and purple gown that screamed of sexual desire, lounged stage right on an orange couch surrounded by funereal wreaths, draped in black and utterly indifferent to Orsino's lament. Orsino's chances of success seemed slim. Viola came through the pillar's opening disheveled, distraught, and mostly undressed (and with no gold for her captain), and so willingly embraced the sojourn to Orsino's court. Thus both Orsino and Viola entered as if birthed into their journey through time to the knowledge that youth's a stuff will not endure.

Olivia's house was stuffed with layabouts celebrating holiday revelry. Toby, as motley in plaid and paisley as any respectable clown, was stupidly drunk throughout; in 2.3 he shamelessly humped the Christmas tree he had knocked over. Maria's severe black dress betrayed her fierce anger at Malvolio; Andrew Aguecheek, tall, skinny, bald, and wearing a yellow three piece suit, stumbled after Toby and his bottles; and Nick Garrison parlayed Fabian's long, streaky black hair, black blouse, ruff, skirt, and stockings into an hilariously androgynous figure. Frank X as Malvolio was a brilliant contrast to all of the above. He was impeccably attired. His frock coat clung to his very bones; he constantly adjusted his white gloves and collar, ever aware of sartorial propriety, and brushed his hair to keep each follicle in place. No wrinkles; nothing amiss...