"Twelfth Night" at Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Until my recent spate of viewing "Hamlet" in vast quantities, I think it would be fair to say that I have seen more versions of "Twelfth Night" than any other Shakespeare play. I guess "A Midsummer Night's Dream" would be up there, too, depending on whether you include junior high school class productions. Anyway, I think it's safe to say that I've seen it a lot because I like it a lot. This post covers the performance of Saturday afternoon, July 2.

This is the second version of this show I've seen at OSF. The first was several years ago in the Elizabethan theater. This time they brought it indoors and (somewhat inexplicably) set the play in a Hollywood movie studio in the 1930s.

The Play

This play is pretty much everything you could want out of a Shakespearean comedy: a shipwreck, mistaken identities, sight gags, puns, some slapstick, and a mega-happy ending. It's tightly staged, and they make a lot out of a fairly simple set. Because they don't have to do much for scene changes, the action flows well.

Great Performances

The cast was all quite good. I was particular amused with Danforth Comins as Andrew Aguecheek, as I've mostly seen him in more serious roles. Even last year as Benedick in "Much Ado About Nothing," he was funny but somewhat restrained. As Aguecheek, he has no reason to hold back, and he does not. Ted Deasy was nicely restrained as Malvolio, which is easy to overplay. If anything, I found it hard to feel that he deserved the abuse he got back from the rest. And OSF regulars Gina Daniels, Kate Mulligan, Rodney Gardiner, and Daniel T. Parker are terrific.

Strange Setting

I'm not sure what the point of setting the play in Hollywood really is. In the program, director Christopher Liam Moore (whose work I enjoy) says that Hollywood in the 30s was about the invention of self, and that movie musicals show the absurd lengths characters go to find love. OK, I guess. But mostly it feels like you're just looking for a different (and admittedly attractive) setting. I didn't really feel like there was a larger message accomplished by the choice of place and time.

Also, I was a little mystified by the portrayal of Duke Orsino. I generally take him to be a pretty straight character, if a bit thick about his love life. But I don't see much in the text that justifies making him as clownish as he was in this version. I get making him a German (or at least, European) immigrant; that suits the period. But his goofy accent and mannerisms didn't seem to suit the character. Why would Viola fall for a goofball?

Captioning

I guess I need to talk about this somewhere. At most of the performances we saw at the Angus Bowmer Theatre last weekend, they were using "open captioning," which involved large video screens to the sides of the stage that showed white text scrolling on a black background. I know it's helpful to some people (and I did occasionally find it useful to get a word I had missed), but mostly it was really distracting. One of our group who has seen this done elsewhere commented that they usually fade the words in and out, rather than scrolling them, as the motion tends to catch one's peripheral vision more.

Out of our group of eight people, most were able to tune the words out, especially if we had seats closer to the front of the house. Two people were just unable to tune it out: One didn't mind because she is accustomed to multiple input streams; the other found it so irritating that she had to leave at the intermission.

I'll be interested to know what the overall feedback is on this. I know the assisted-listening devices can be problematic, so they'd like to have something that works for everyone, and this can help those who don't need full-time assistance.

I should also add two other points:

1. Directors like to use the areas to the side of the stage in the Bowmer. As a result, some of the action takes place in front of, or adjacent to, the text screens. At that point they are very distracting. Indeed, Feste made reference to it in one of his speeches. Nice to have a little fun with it, but better not to need to.
2. The scrolling seemed to be manually operated, as I guess it would need to be. But it was therefore not consistently synced with the spoken words, so if I wanted to look for clarification, I had to search the screen and sometimes wait for the words I wanted. Worse, in this particular performance, they committed a cardinal sin: showing Malvolio's big exit line before he said it, as he was stomping past the screen to exit the side door. Ouch.

All in all, I wasn't really fond of my first experiences with the captioning. I hope they are open to trying different systems that aren't so intrusive to those who don't need or want them. Also, neither the website nor the program indicated that the shows were were seeing were going to be captioned. I'm not sure how I could have avoided this stuff, had I known I wanted to.

Overall

This was a good show. Definitely at least average for OSF, which is a high bar. Good cast, good costumes. Effective use of the stage and set, in spite of the captioning screens. All in all, a worthy effort, worth seeing.