Twelfth Night at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery

I wanted to do another post about Hamlet, but every time I thought about it I was gripped with a passionate malaise and I wound up writing a bunch of nonsense.

Strange.

I went to a production of Twelfth Night at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery this weekend. It was pretty good.

They screen movies at the cemetery at midnight during the summer months and I've never been. I'm not much for midnight movies anymore. I tend to fall asleep. Also I don't really enjoy watching movies while sitting outdoors either. There are all sorts of discomforts -- moisture, critters, chilliness -- and I'd rather be inside and warm and cozy. That's a sure sign of aging, isn't it?

But Twelfth Night was being performed in a little theater that was a converted chapel. It's a nice space for this show. The seats were set up around the perimeter and all the action was in the middle. It was a matinee, so there was a little column of light cascading in from a stained glass window, not unlike the light that falls into the map room in Indiana Jones and points the way to the well of souls.

The comedy in this production was pretty awesome. Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and the mayhem they caused was fun, but it was really Charles Janasz as Malvolio who stole the show. His oppressive grimace was spot-on and watching him piece together the contents of the forged love letter was like watching Chico interpret Harpo's whistle-narrated semaphores telling him that they have to stop Groucho from being seduced by the blonde bombshell before Margaret Dumont catches him and the sweet kid who's depending on them will lose her family hotel/sanitarium/opera house/department store.

Actually, the production was like a Marx Brothers movie in a lot of ways. You sort of had to meander through the underwhelming Olivia - Viola - Orsino love triangle in order to get to the marvelous comedy. The same is true in a number of Marx Brothers movies where Zeppo or Allan Jones has some yawntastic love story that you tolerate because the goofy is so very pleasing.

There was also live music accompanying the show (in addition to the Fool plucking away at intervals). But there was a hipster quality to the costuming and style of the show and that spilled over into the music, which worked all right for some of the tunes, but when it came to the end of the show... well, frankly it was sad. And Twelfth Night is not a show that should leave you sad. I guess that's what happens when Malvolio is the character we love the most and in the last scene he marches off stage in tatters proclaiming that he will be revenged upon everyone.

The last line of the play should be filled with joy and revelry and a promise for future delights:

But that's all one, our play is done,

And we'll strive to please you everyday. (5:1)

But the odd, ethereal melody made it a little bit disconcerting. I sort of didn't want them to strive to please me everyday if this was the music they were going to use. Moody indie-rock was an appropriate selection for the scene in the kitchen when the fool plays for Sir Toby and Sir Andrew. It is set up thusly:

FOOL: Would you have a love song or a song of good life?

TOBY: A love song, a love song.

ANDREW: Ay, ay, I care not for good life. (2:3)

I don't know though. Sir Andrew does have a good point. As John Cusack says in High Fidelity: "Which came first, the music or the misery?" Love and melancholy are too closely intertwined. Maybe it's more appropriate in modern times that even in a happy ending, we are sad. It's not like the Fool falls in love at the end of the play, so if he's going to sing a song, it should be a minstrel's lament. He's a wayfaring clown, and it's his lot to wander and witness the bliss of everyone his comedy touches. But he has no access to that bliss himself. Like Michael Landon in Highway to Heaven, his wings are constantly eluding him.

       Maybe they'll be there, around the corner, in the next town, on the next stage, in the next session of comic romance where he facilitates love and mocks misery with his sad bastard music and his rocky wit.

11th Grade Gabe on Twelfth Night During his Disciplinary Probation

Gabe Llanas

English 11

Ms. Stewart

1/05/95

Malvolio Got Did Wrong

Ms. Stewart, after reading this you’ll see that Malvolio got did wrong up in this play. He was a dedicated and hard-working servant to the Countess Olivia, and when he dared to dream that she might be in love with him, he gets it all shoved back in his face and embarrassed and even PUNISHED for expressing his harmless little crush. Brutal.

You got these spoiled bullies Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Sir Toby Belch raising a ruckus while Malvolio’s mistress, the lovely Olivia, is trying to mourn. And Malvolio comes in to quiet these fools down:

My masters are you mad? ... Do you make an alehouse of my lady’s house, that you squeak out your coziers’ catches without any mitigation or remorse of voice? Is there no respect of place, persons nor time in you? (2:3)

And what happens to the dedicated servant? Maria, Olivia’s waiting woman, decides to play a prank on loyal Malvolio by convincing him that Olivia is in love with him.

I will drop in his way some obscure epistles of love ... I can write very like my lady your niece (2:3)

Observe him, for the love of mockery, for I know this letter will make a contemplative idiot of him. (2:5)

So they drop this note, and Malvolio, already smitten and dreaming of his lady’s love (“To be Count Malvolio.” [2:5]) is swept up in the dream of it all. The letter says that Olivia loves to see him cross-gartered in yellow stockings and always smiling.

Jove, I thank thee! I will smile. I will do everything that thou wilt have me. (2:5)

Malvolio tries so desperately to impress her that she thinks he’s crazy and has him locked up for a madman!

Now let’s say hypothetically, that maybe someone who was of a lesser rank than you, Ms. Stewart, perceived some “epistles of love” in the way you smiled at him or her, and caressed his or her arm when you congratulated him or her on a well-written essay. And this innocent, hormone-laden gentleperson then expressed their harmless admiration of you in a cross-gartered essay (which he worked very hard on) then say he or she was oh, I don’t know… DORMED for two weekends by the Dean of Students, now that wouldn’t be right, would it?

I mean, if life is a romantic comedy, then some people are the Violas and everyone falls in love with them. And some people are the Orsino’s and they pine and then wind up happy because of dumb luck. And some people are the Sir Tobies who drink and make merry and find love in a lighthearted companion. But some of us are Malvolios and even though we long to fit in, we’re just a little different. A little weird. We take quiet hours in the dorm a little too seriously and we don’t have the money to fill our wardrobe with clothes from the Gap so we wear shirts and ties that our mom bought us at Wal-Mart. Some people come to Illyria on scholarship and are looking fool-heartedly for anyway to join the party in a permanent fashion.

So, I’m just saying, before one goes turning people in to the Dean for a little wishful and borderline inappropriate thinking, maybe one should consider that the play is called: Twelfth Night OR What You Will and in Shakespeare’s day, the word “will” meant “wish.” And every other character in the play gets what they wish for: Viola gets Orsino, Sebastian gets to find out that his sister is still alive, Olivia gets to marry someone who looks like Cesario… why should Malvolio not get his wishes fulfilled too?

Rejection hurts. Some sexy, gorgeous English teachers probably don’t ever have to experience that, but the Fool seems to understand it, when he sings to Orsino:

Fly away, fly away, breath,

I am slain by a fair cruel maid. (2:4)

I know Malvolio can't take a joke and declares his intention to get revenge on everyone in the sequel, Thirteenth Night, but some Malvolios are more rational and learn the hard lesson about un-reciprocated love from Olivia:

Love sought is good, but given unsought is better. (3:1)

No more soughting love for me. Besides, Dr. Wheeler told me I’d get suspended if I wrote another inappropriate reading response and that could screw my chances of getting into Yale.

Twelfth Night: Down Wit' O.P.P.

Gabe drop a load on em.

OPP, how can I explain it? I'll take it frame by frame it.

See O is for Original, like OG, oh say can you see? 

The first P's for Practices -- not on your mattresses -- this P is clean for your families -- P.

 The last P is simple... it's for Production.

     I saw Twelfth Night in 2003 at the old Guthrie in Minneapolis when it was next to the Walker Art Center and the Cherry in the Spoon. It was an Original Practices Production done by the touring Globe Theater. And it was the best thing I’ve ever seen on stage.

      Wit' OPP the actors wear costumes made from the fabrics that were used in the seventeenth century (no velcro or zippers to ease costume changes), oak sets, no changes in lighting, and of course all the women's roles are played by men.

     Mark Rylance, who was also artistic director of the Globe Theater at the time, played the Countess Olivia. He breathed comedy into almost every moment of the show. When he walked he would only turn in right angles. It was a perfect satire of the formality of Olivia’s station, which stands in for the formality of her grief, which is undone by the fool:

FESTE: Good madonna, Why mournest thou?

OLIVIA: Good fool, for my brother’s death.

FESTE: I think his soul is in hell, madonna.

OLIVIA: I know his soul is in heaven, fool.

FESTE: The more fool, Madonna, to mourn for your brother’s soul, being in heaven. (1:5)

     Feste the Fool played the lute and sang his songs, which were sad and funny and beautiful, and the entire sense of the play as a revelry to accompany the feast of the epiphany on the twelfth and final night of Christmas was captured perfectly.

     OPP is long. This one was four hours. There were two intermissions and I wanted it to never end.

     I wished I were a mouse, so that I might stow away on the Globe Theater caravan among the sour costumes and prop swords. Venturing countryward to mimic and master the intricacies of their stagecraft, living off morsels peppering the warped wooden floors of taverns and actors’ pubs. 

As they performed for the human population, I might gather the critters of every hamlet and present the vicarious artistry of my patrons. Until the day when there was a call for someone to stand in. To play the dagger I see before me or Yorick’s skull, perhaps Desdemona’s handkerchief or the lark, who sings from yon pomegranate tree. Becoming a passing component of the bard's lore. The Shakespearean mouse.

Thinking about OPP has caused me to reflect on some of the plays I’ve already read without considering them in terms of staging, or as I’m going to discuss in this post: casting.

Viola in this play, is disguised as a boy named Cesario for most of the show. Olivia falls in love with Cesario, not realizing he is a girl. When all the women's roles are played by men, so much comedy comes from the confusion of the sexes on stage. A level of hilarity is achieved at seeing a man play a woman like the formal Olivia that wouldn’t precisely exist in gender-appropriate casting of the role. This is not to underestimate the humor available to a female actor who could find her own masterful comedy in the nooks and crannies of the role. But it would be different... and it wouldn't be OPP.

In The Taming of the Shrew, the youngest sister Bianca is the fair and beautiful of the pair. So assuming that within the troupe of men who play these roles there is one who is the fairest and most eunuch of the lot, he would be cast as Bianca, so that this love story might play as sincerely as possible. However, the role of Kate would be played by a man of some greater masculinity.

Add to that the fact that The Taming of the Shrew is actually a play within a play, being acted out for the drunk: Christopher Sly, who has been fooled into believing that his drunken life was a dream and that he is actually a mighty lord. One could surmise that the role of Kate might be played for pure slapstick comedy and the most brutish man in the company may have been cast in the role so as to provide maximum delight to Christopher Sly and the lowest common denominator he personifies. Imagine Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds dressed as a cheerleader.

This would allow all of Petruchio’s abuses against Kate to be seen as comic, as well as all of his musings on her beauty, which seem to be sarcastic anyway. 

And the happy end of the play, Kate’s speech on the submissive role of the wife, would be hilarious before she and Petruchio march off to consummate their marriage, the image of which would cause all those in attendance to vomit slightly in the backs of their mouths or laugh and tuck away their rotten fruits and vegetables for another play.

Shakespeare was a popular playwright, he was entertaining people. All of his works are poetic and eloquent, but they're not treatises. I was pretty harsh on The Taming of the Shrew when I read it in November, without considering comedy's liberty to be naughty by nature. 

I’d forgotten that these are plays. And plays are meant to be staged. It's an important lesson for we stowed-away mice to remember.

More on Twelfth Night in 2010.