British novelist and stage director Neil Bartlett may well be taking the famous ”What You Will” subtitle of ”Twelfth Night” to a new, anything-goes extreme.
For starters, his version of Shakespeare`s popular comedy, to open Jan. 20 at the Goodman Theatre, will feature a pair of 16-year-old male high-school juniors (William Jones and Nikkieli Lewis) as the fraternal male-female twin pair, Sebastian and Viola. There`s an obvious logic to casting Viola with a male actor: Viola is in disguise most of the play as a young boy, a familiar stratagem for Shakespeare, who wrote at a time when all the female parts were played by teenage boys and who often went in for plots that enabled his female characters to go into male disguise.
But Bartlett doesn`t let his ”what you will” energy flag there. He`s monkeying with the rest of the genders in the play as well, casting all but one of the other 10 male roles, and the 2 female ones, with women. And he`s reserving one other male role, that of Feste, the clown-musician in the story, for a male performer, professional New York musician George Merritt, who will sit throughout at a grand piano center stage and bring home, via his fingers on the ivories, the comedy`s famous opening line: ”If music be the food of love, play on.”
”Twelfth Night” is considered one of Shakespeare`s pastoral comedies, an exploration of love set in an imaginary land, Illyria. The involved plot complications include switched identities, disguises, shipwrecked family members reunited after a long separation and an elaborate practical joke played on an arrogant, would-be lover.
The multi-talented Bartlett is a 33-year-old British writer and classicist, whose recent novel about contemporary gay love, ”Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall,” is both bestseller and a Book of the Month Club Alternate, and whose prior work for the Goodman was a translation of ”The Misanthrope” set in Madonna`s Hollywood home. It was that translation and his production of ”Sarrasine,” a musical piece adapted from a work by Balzac, that led the theater to offer the young director a crack at a mainstage work all his own.
It is the largest stage project yet for the London director and his team of collaborators, movement director Leah Hausman and composer-musical director Nicolas Bloomfield. Bartlett insistently shares ”Twelfth Night” credit with this duo and works with them on other projects in a collective called Gloria. He also credits set and costumer Richard Hudson and lighting designer Scott Zielinski with the look, energy and daring of the show, set at the turn of the century, between ”the opening of `A Doll`s House` and the time when Coco Chanel made men`s clothes accessible female attire.
”We began by asking the question, `What if we did the comedy as Shakespeare would have done it, with an all-male cast?` ” Bartlett says.
”But we felt that if you do a show involving male drag and sex, it becomes a show about the question, `Are these characters really gay?` `Is there a buried gay subtext?` The fact of the matter is that the gayness isn`t buried in the story at all. There is a gay character that in the Elizabethan world would have been recognized as such-Antonio, the protector and lover of the male twin Sebastian.
”Also, I didn`t want to do a show about `Oh, my God, homosexuality, how extraordinary!` Because in my own work, there`s nothing extraordinary about homeosexuality as a theme.
”An even stronger motivation was that we didn`t want to go into a theater and audition for a company of 14 men. It`s difficult enough in the 20th Century, when Shakespearean casts are routinely made up of 10 men and 3 women. I couldn`t see slamming the door on a queue of actresses by announcing we were doing an all-male version.”
Why not all-women, then? ”That would miss out on something important. The basic dynamic, the action, begins when a young child (Viola) is shipwrecked on a beach and says, `What country, friends, is this?` That child is thereafter thrown into an adult world and fights to play the adult game of love and courtship. And because of that, everything gets confused, misread and misinterpreted.
”I felt very strongly that the fact that there are two actors who are physically, mentally, vocally boys, comes to the heart of the play, as Shakesperare saw it. And Feste the piano player and musician is a person completely outside the play in some ways. `Twelfth Night` is about two houses, Olivia`s and Orsino`s. The action shifts back and forth between the two. Feste works in both but doesn`t live in either. He`s an outsider, and by making him a man at center stage, in a world of women, the gap between those worlds becomes a visible fact.”
Bartlett says he isn`t concerned that his 16-year-olds are taking on an overly challenging task with Shakespeare, in particular Lewis, who, as Viola, is playing one of the traditionally great roles in the canon. ”You give the part to actors who aren`t afraid,” Bartlett says. ”And my young actors are not. And the audiences will see them on stage as 16. You won`t expect them to deliver with the experience of a veteran Shakespearean actor. And it`s that youth, that look, that freshness, that in our tradition is unactable.”
There`s a deeper issue at work in the play that fuels Bartlett and his team. ”Illyria, where the story takes place, is really a dangerous country, a place where people take the most amazing risks. It therefore seems appropriate to have men played by women, and the great role of Viola by a young man with little experience, and Feste played by an actual musician, because it invests the proceedings with that sense of risk. If `Twelfth Night` isn`t risky, or peculiar, you`re not in Illyria.”
What this all means, in part, is that some of Shakespeare`s most renowned comic male characters will be played by women: Malvolio (Suzanne Petri), Sir Toby Belch (Lola Pashalinski), Sir Anthony Aguecheek (Jeanette Schwaba). But Bartlett says all kinds of thematic discoveries have erupted from the sexual hanky-panky as well.
”No one has asked, `How do I play a man?` They just go for it. What`s taking time is the women playing women. How do you invent a woman? How does a woman in Illyria behave? How does she sit and hold herself? It gets into the basic conventions. Men touch people, women touch only themselves. That`s a rule of Western body language.
”Moreover, the character Olivia is very well educated, wealthy, without a father, brother or other male in her household. She runs it herself and declares she won`t marry the Count Orsino for seven years. What sort of woman is that? The maid, Maria, would seem a very straightforward stage convention: maids are petite, submissive. But Maria (to be played by longtime storefront comic Robin Baber) is mean, aggressive, full of jealousy and starved for power. One actress remarked the other day, `All of the men in this play are wimps and all of the women are bossy.”`
Bartlett is delighted. ”In London, what I mostly go in for is called performance art, or gay theater, work that doesn`t get into buildings like the Goodman but is seen in smallscale arthouses. The idea here is to bring all this into the Goodman, but through the back door, not the front.
”If I told someone that I`m doing a play about a boy in drag and women in drag and that everyone in the play is in love with someone who doesn`t love them back, and that it`s an exploration of homosexuality and bisexuality and heterosexuality all in one, they might say, `At the Goodman?` And then I get to answer back, `Yes, and it`s by William Shakespeare.”`
