Twelfth Night, Folger Theatre
In Mei Ann Teo's production of Twelfth Night at the Folger Theatre, the evening's ethos leans into the play's subtitle or What You Will. The play, timed to run through Pride Month, has also fully embraced the inherent queerness of the text, with RuPaul's sensibility as important as Shakespeare's world and text. It makes for a fascinating balancing act of preserving the original, adding in the new, and bringing out a suggestion of what has always lain just under the surface.
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Although some might argue for As You Like It, I do think that Twelfth Night opens itself up most under a queer lens of all of Shakespeare's plays, both in its central love stories and its foundational embrace of the topsy turvy world of a traditional Twelfth Night celebration. What becomes a little tricky to navigate is central to staging so many of the comedies: just how far can we push this world so that the diversions and anachronisms (of which Shakespeare was himself no stranger to) and contemporary sensibilities can still have space for the story to hang together.
The cast assembled by Teo includes multiple trans and nonbinary actors whose presence on stage reflects back the ways in which the performance of gender in the world of the play and on Shakespeare's stage was mutable, and who stand in their own natural right to inhabit these characters on a world-class stage in the current day. In particular, the pairing of Lilli Hokama's Viola and Alyssa Keegan's Orsino crackles with chemistry and honesty in their scenes together and apart.
There is, however, a moment just before the intermission break in the gulling of Malvolio, as he reads aloud from the letter fabricated by Maria, Sir Toby, et al, that the following exchange occurs:
MALVOLIO: By my life, this is my lady’s hand! These be her very c’s, her u’s, and her t’s, and thus she makes her great P’s. It is in contempt of question her hand.
SIR ANDREW: (aside) Her c’s, her u’s, and her t’s. Why that?
In the text, Malvolio simply continues to read the letter and moves the scene along. I have seen many an editorial gloss on this moment bend itself into pretzel shapes to explain the crude joke being gestured toward while still avoiding printing the word in question. The text of the letter itself doesn't include any actual vocabulary alluding to genitalia, but Shakespeare chooses those specific letters for Malvolio to call out so that he can make the intended joke. I have also rarely seen a Twelfth Night where the joke doesn't land, played in any number of ways. In Teo's production, the moment circles back later in the scene, as Sir Andrew loudly proclaims "OH, it's cunt," as Maria and Toby gamely attempt to cover the moment with aptly-timed bird calls.
Why have I circled round and round this particular moment? Because it's one in which it feels as though the temptation to follow the good ideas of the rehearsal room don't always work as well in full performance, which happens at multiple times during the evening. Spelling out the joke isn't as funny as the thing itself. The production wants to embrace sex and kink, but adding a brace of dildos and whips and floggers and vinyl on stage isn't in and of itself a load-bearing addition if you don't buy into why this is all part of the same world as the rest of the story, and Teo's production didn't sell me on this aspect.
There are things to celebrate in this production, but it does feel a little off-balance. That said, if for more than four hundred years, the overall balance of Shakespeare has so often been claimed by white, cisgendered heteronormative readers and audiences, maybe the scales need adjusting with a few more outliers in this direction.
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