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Singing in the rain: Twelfth Night at UW
Romance and rowdiness will take center stage in the theatre and performance program’s upcoming production, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night. The show explores love, power, identity, and the intersection of all three during a fleeting moment in history. It will run from Nov. 24 to 28 at the Theatre of the Arts in ML.
“There’s a lot of confusion, there’s a lot of hijinks, it’s very funny for the audience but it’s not as funny for the characters,” said fourth-year knowledge integration and theatre and performance student Sylvie Potje. Twelfth Night begins when the shipwrecked Viola is separated from her twin brother Sebastian. To survive, she disguises herself as a man named Cesario and works under Duke Orsino, the persistent suitor of the mourning Countess Olivia. Viola falls in love with Orsino, Olivia falls in love with Cesario, and a cascade of further shenanigans drives the play forward.
Observing much of the action is Olivia’s court jester, Feste, played by Potje. While Feste provides comedic relief as the play’s trademark fool, she also pokes at societal expectations surrounding class and gender through her jokes. “Although she’s a servant like a lot of other characters in the play, she has a lot more power to speak freely and criticize the people around her, which she uses to its full extent,” Potje said. “No longer are her jokes just her spouting wisdom and no one listening. They’re her trying to preach something important and nobody’s listening.”
The actress also doubles as a member of the dramaturgy team on the production, researching the role of the fool in Shakespeare’s work. A critical part of Feste’s role in the plot is jester’s privilege, the social acceptance allowing a jester to mock and criticize freely without repercussions. While Feste is seen as “just a fool” whose words are nonsensical, the privilege ironically makes her a valued member at court, in contrast to Malvolio, Olivia’s butler. “Malvolio is trying to rise [through] the ranks, but he’s doing it by trying to be a perfect butler and doing everything right,” Potje noted. “Feste, meanwhile, is shouting things [and] criticizing Olivia, but ultimately has a better relationship with the nobility that she serves, because she doesn’t follow the system the way that the other servants do.”
♦Sylvie Potje during rehearsal. (Photo credit: Jeane Johan)
That irreverence for expectations goes hand in hand with one of the play’s key themes. “What does it mean to be foolish, even if you believe that you are acting in your best interests? That’s something I’m really trying to pull out from my lines,” Potje said.
The concept is further amplified by this adaptation’s setting, located along the Amalfi coast of Italy in the 1920s. The so-called Roaring Twenties were a time of abundance and excess, sandwiched between two dark decades of history: World War I followed by the Spanish Flu pandemic in the 1910s, and the Great Depression of the 1930s. That context was a major impetus for the action in Twelfth Night, said fourth-year theatre and performance student Ethan Warren. After his role as Sims and Poppa in The Nether, Warren returns to the stage as Sir Toby Belch, a drunken knight who also contributes to the revelry and comedy of the show, but in a different way than Feste.
“It is honouring a character to let them expand outside of what they’re traditionally slot into, and giving them the respect that they can be a [multi-faceted] person,” Warren said of his role. “In this case, this means inviting in their demons and their dark parts of themselves.” While much of Toby’s humour traditionally comes from his drunkenness and his role in the central prank played on Malvolio, in this adaptation, it also is his coping mechanism for PTSD from serving in World War I. “This person is struggling with the horrors of this war and all these personal tragedies that they’ve seen, and so we get this undercurrent behind this drunkenness,” Warren elaborated.
He added that the 1920s were also a time of breaking social boundaries and new starts. “It is this super experimental, abundant time [with] all of these explorations of new ways of being,” with sexual liberation, women’s suffrage, and the underground alcohol scene becoming more popular during this period.
“It’s like an oasis,” Warren said. “You walk through the desert of all of these awful events, and you sit [by] this water … you’re able to do all of these beautiful things, and in a few seconds you’re going to have to walk on into that desert. It’s this moment of respite, but all around it is tragedy.”
That feeling also bleeds into the other characters, Potje added, many of whom face grief and loss in various forms. “Everyone’s celebrating that the war is over, but there’s still some deep pain and mourning that a lot of the characters are going through … A lot of characters are returning home different than they’ve been before.” Olivia starts off in mourning for her deceased father and brother, who are casualties of World War I in this version. Even Feste’s brief songs, whose lyrics have been preserved in the script but not the melodies, are directed to sound mournful.
The play’s title also has a shadow hovering over it. The name refers to the last night of the Christmastide season before Epiphany, which in Shakespeare’s time, was a last hurrah of festivities where strict social norms were heavily loosened and disorderly conduct was acceptable. Warren called it “a blowout right before the rationing,” when people would hunker down after the twelfth night during the physically darkest time of the year and no crops could grow during the winter.
♦From left to right: Sylvie Potje, Brooke Daher, Ethan Warren, and Sophie Skye during rehearsal. (Photo credit: Jeane Johan)
Above all though, the play is about the universal human experience embodying simultaneously opposite qualities: light and dark; joy and sorrow; fear and hope. Warren and Potje both pointed to the last song of the play, where the line, “The rain, it raineth every day,” is repeated twice at the end of each stanza, save for the last: “With hey, ho, the wind and the rain / But that’s all one, our play is done, / And we’ll strive to please you every day.”
“What is indulgence as protest? What is personal fulfillment as [a] counter-action against oblivion [and] pessimism? I think there’s something so interesting in that idea,” Warren said. “We consciously fill our lives with these periods of abundance; expressions of love, and of life … because we’re going to lose them.”
Potje and Warren hope audiences will come away from the show with a stronger connection to that message and to the play’s characters beyond the surface humour. “The worst reaction someone could have walking out from our show isn’t ‘I didn’t like it,’ it’s ‘I didn’t understand it,” Potje emphasized. She also hopes that the cast and crew’s work on adapting the text will raise the audience’s understanding of Shakespeare’s work in general.
“I hope that the audience sees a true person on stage, not a construction and not just a tool that serves a specific purpose,” Warren said of the play’s characters, especially ones that may seem two-dimensional. He also wants audience members to find connection with those on stage and each other “in a really personal, really intimate way that we really struggle with these days.”
Last but not least, Potje encourages the UW community to support theatre and student-led productions on campus: “We are not an afterthought to both the arts program and the university. We are a very thriving program in our own right. And we’re very excited to put on this work, which is very different [from] a lot of work going on at the university.”
Twelfth Night runs from Nov. 24 to Nov. 28 at the Theatre of the Arts in ML.