By Ron Ford,
The SFCC Revelers will present Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night as part of its 2014-2015 Perception and Deception season.
Bill Marlowe, director of the play, said the comedy of gender identities fits perfectly into the season’s theme.
“Twelfth Night is the perfect classical choice for our Perceptions and Deceptions season because it involves a woman disguising herself as a man in order to survive in a man’s world,” said Marlowe.
Twelfth Night tells the tale of twins, Viola and Sebastian, who are separated in a shipwreck and believe each other to be dead. Viola assumes the identity of her brother in order to not be taken advantage of in the male-dominated society.
It is a play Marlowe is very familiar with.
“This is my favorite Shakespeare play,” Marlowe said. “This is now my ninth time working on this play. I do it because I love it, I love this play, and I think it’s very accessible for today’s audience, because a lot of it is written in prose, not in poetry.”
It is common for modern theatres to present “concept” productions of Shakespeare plays by setting them in different times and places than specified in the plays. This time, however, Marlowe decided to stage the play as traditionally as possible.
“We’re trying to recreate as close as we can the environment of what a Shakespeare audience member would have experienced,” Marlowe said. “All of the costuming is Elizabethan in nature. All of the music in the show is Elizabethan. So we are trying to do as authentic a recreation of the historical period as we possibly can.”
One convention of Shakespeare’s time not being embraced by this production is the casting of men in the women’s roles. The women here are played by women, in spite of the plot’s gender confusion.
Shakayla Hacker returns to the SFCC stage after her debut in last quarter’s Rashomon.
“I play Lady Olivia, and she’s lost her brother and her father and isn’t really in the mood for male attention,” Hacker said “This poses a problem because it seems that several men in the show are crazy for Olivia! Creating this in-charge, uptight persona for her is challenging but extremely rewarding.”
Hacker joins a cast praised by the show’s director.
“I have an outstanding cast,” Marlowe said. “I’ve got some just terrific new people, and there’s some of our mainstays in it as well.”
Blake Krueger-King is happy to be returning to the SFCC stage for the fourth time.
“I play Sir Andrew Aguecheek, the foolish knight,” Krueger-King said. “He’s very over-the-top, very foppish, a bit feminine. He pumps himself up to be this great fighter that he isn’t. I do a lot of pratfalls, a lot of physical comedy because he thinks he’s greater than he is. It’s fun, but it’s fun with the cost of bruises and painful joints.”
Marlowe has encouraged his cast to improvise physical bits for the raucous comedy.
“If we actors have an idea, Bill doesn’t want to hear us talk about it, he wants to see us do it,” said Nicholas Fortner, who plays Sir Toby Belch. ”We get up on stage if we have a bit in mind, we’ll do it for Bill, and if he likes it, then we’ll keep it in the show. And if not, then it’s back to the drawing board.”
In the heat of all the creative energy, personal bonds are being forged as well.
“I’m really proud of the cast; we’re growing at every rehearsal,” Fortner said. “These trusting bonds that we’ve built for each other on stage rehearsing, we will take with us to performances. I guess a special family is growing here. That’s all I can think of to call it really.”
Catch Twelfth Night at the Spartan Playhouse and see if you feel the love.