Photo by Liz Lauren
The stage is festooned with palm trees blowing in a gentle Caribbean breeze that occasionally gives way to stormy downpours. There are beaches with driftwood in the corners of the thrust. When music plays, it has a reggae flavor (and even recognizable tunes). Island dance opens and closes the play, and Christine Pascual’s colorful costumes reflect a much warmer climate than the audience experiences on the way to the theatre.
This is Illyria, or at least director Tyrone Phillips’ vision of it in Chicago Shakespeare Company’s Twelfth Night, the first play of its first post-Barbara Gaines season, and Phillips wastes no time in making his mark. The first-generation Jamaican American doesn’t specifically model his setting on his ancestral home, but you can practically feel the island breezes and smell the sea just beyond Sydney Lynne’s set, and for Chicago in November that is certainly welcome.
Phillips substitutes reggae classics for the songs that the clever fool Feste (Israel Erren Ford) sings throughout the play, and Ford’s warm, fluid voice is so smooth that the director could have doubled or even tripled the number of songs and no one would ever complain. His voice is not his only strength, though; he makes an excellent clown with his verbal repartée and his movement as well, fitting in well no matter whom he is with.
As wonderful as Ford is, though, Feste is not the center of the play, which is a typical Shakespearean comedy full of lost twins, mistaken identity, cross-dressing (has anyone told the far right about this Shakespeare guy?), myriad other kinds of silliness, and even some comical nastiness. Phillips’ cut of the play manages to bring in all of that—plus the aforementioned singing and dancing—in a very quick two hours, including an intermission.
The center of the play is actually Viola (Jayda LaVonne), newly shipwrecked on the island by a storm that, she believes, killed her twin brother. (If that suggests any kind of spoiler, you need to brush up your Shakespeare.) Viola spends the play pretending to be a man named Cesario, a disguise she adopts in order to survive in this unknown place, and “he” quickly becomes a servant to the local Duke, Orsino (Yao Dogbe). LaVonne is outstanding in her role, showing herself to the audience as both the young man she pretends to be and the woman she actually is. Shakespeare loved to use such gender-bending disguises to wittily explore the different worlds we tread depending on whether we are perceived as male or female, and sometimes—well, most of the time, actually—the conflict and the comedy derives from a heterosexual disguised character falling in love with a person who appears to be her same sex.
In this case, Viola falls in love the the Duke, but (as Cesario) she is tasked with helping him woo a local countess named Olivia (Christiana Clark, letting every bit of exaggerated acting she can muster loose on the stage). Of course, just to complicate what is already getting very complicated, Olivia quickly falls in love with the messenger instead of the Duke (not knowing, of course, that Cesario is actually Viola in disguise).
Just to get something obvious out of the way: yes, Shakespeare does get a lot of comic mileage here and elsewhere from the notion of same-sex relationships created by the cross-dressing he is so fond of. His goal, though, in every case, is not to make fun of them. They are never overtly the butt of any joke, but rather a silly secret that the audience is privy to. Nor is the cross-dressing itself (which is always at least loosely reasonable within the plot) made into a joke; rather, he uses it to explore the very essence of gender and gender roles. Your transgender critic finds this completely benign.
Back to Twelfth Night:
Shakespeare loads multiple subplots into this play, and Phillips gets the most of them all despite the short running time. The biggest one (which also involves Feste) concerns a pretentious, stuck-up, effete, egotistic member of Olivia’s court named Malvolio, played with comic gusto by Paul Oakley Stoval, who takes an immediate dislike to the clown. Other members of Olivia’s household decide to bring the arrogant steward down to size, and all of them (Ford, Alex Goodrich, Danielle Davis, and Ronald L. Conner) get tremendous laughs out of their complicated plot. (Another quirk of the Bard: you can do anything to a jerk, even if he has done nothing specific to deserve it, and it will be funny.)
The second major subplot involves several tropes at once. To the already-established cross-dressing and lost twin, we add mistaken identity by discovering that the supposedly “dead” twin is not as deceased as we thought. Sebastian (Justen Ross) also survived the shipwreck and has befriended Antonio (Adam Poss), a sailor who lives in Illyria but is suspected of crimes by the Duke and has come home to try to make things right but is thwarted by a “Sebastian” who knows nothing of him or the purse full of cash Antonio has entrusted to him. (Of course, it’s actually Cesario—err, Viola.)
Phillips makes these typical comedic Shakespearean shenanigans feel fresh, and the tropical island setting (aided by Xavier Pierce’s lighting and Willow James’ sound, as well as Mike Tutaj’s projections) is actually one of the reasons for that. Illyria has become a unique and memorable location, one that suggests warmth and sunlight but is currently overrun by silly humans doing silly things…until the reggae music returns and all is set right.
Twelfth Night is playing at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater at 800 E Grand Ave, Chicago, IL 60611 until November 26th. Check the website for specific dates, times, and tickets. Find more information about current plays on our front page recs and at theatreinchicago.com.