Twelfth Night overview – Lupita Nyong’o and Peter Dinklage anchor enjoyable, if skinny, manufacturing | Stage

New York’s most well-known venue for Shakespeare within the Park has returned, and with it the grand custom of waking up at 4am and/or sleeping on the bottom in an effort to rating free tickets to star-studded theater. The Delacorte, an open-air amphitheater in Central Park, paused its annual out of doors collection of high-profile and free summer season exhibits in 2024 to proceed with a renovation, and now returns, refurbished – and briefly restocked with a bunch of acquainted faces. For their manufacturing of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the Public Theater has snagged Peter Dinklage, Sandra Oh, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Daphne Rubin-Vega, singer/actor Moses Sumney, and Lupita Nyong’o within the central function of Viola, reverse her real-life brother Junior as Viola’s twin Sebastian.

The Nyong’o siblings and director Saheem Ali all grew up in Nairobi, Kenya, and there are snatches of Swahili dialogue from Viola and Sebastian, separated through shipwreck because the play opens. Viola washes ashore on the coast of Illyria, afraid that Sebastian could also be useless. She disguises herself as a person known as Cesario and takes a job serving Duke Orsino (Khris Davis), who makes use of Cesario to ship messages to Olivia (Oh), who he loves. Olivia falls in love with Cesario/Viola, who falls in love with Orsino, who nonetheless pines for Olivia. Olivia additionally figures into a comic book subplot, the place Sir Toby (John Ellison Conlee) and his sidekick Andrew (Ferguson), hedonists each, play a vengeful trick on Malvolio (Dinklage) for spoiling their enjoyable. They persuade Malvolio that Olivia loves him, sending him on a mission to seduce her, which prompts her to assume him mad. Sebastian turns up, too, although his function is secondary. This is a considerably abbreviated manufacturing, lower all the way down to below two hours, no intermission and never plenty of respiratory room.

Returning to that Swahili dialogue: it supplies beautiful grace notes, and a few real moments of pure performing for an viewers that will not know the play nor the language by coronary heart (or in any respect). It additionally underlines, presumably unintentionally, the sameness of a number of the present’s different performances. Everyone in it’s fairly humorous and charming; the solid additionally tends to goose laughs by juxtaposing fashionable emphases and gestures with the Elizabethan verse. This helps convey a number of the that means throughout in a playful manner, and garners loads of large laughs. It additionally typically wears skinny regardless of the number of characters and actors the present employs.

It’s most likely no accident that the solid members who most stand out are on reverse poles from this energized however generic strategy. Nyong’o has loads of comedian moments the place her Viola-as-Cesario should carry out a cartoonish model of masculinity, maybe not a lot much less restrained than Orsino’s preening “real” model, backed up by a crew of macho yes-men. (In one of many higher bodily operating gags, a stern look from Orsino sends certainly one of them into repeated, punitive push-ups.) But she has room, too, for quieter moments of actual sincerity, and sells a love story with Orsino that, on this telling at the least, would in any other case really feel barely-there. She anchors a manufacturing that in any other case prioritizes shtick and showmanship.

Dinklage, in the meantime, goes additional into full-bodied comedy than his co-stars, who’re already loads dedicated. He does a terrifically ingenious job turning Malvolio’s officiousness – the standard that so irritates Sir Toby and Andrew – right into a exact type of romantic delirium. While a number of the different gamers give their deliveries some fashionable punctuation, Dinklage is doing one thing bolder and extra dexterous along with his physicality and his distinctive voice. Malvolio’s pompousness takes on a sort of deranged purity; he could have damaged up different characters’ revelry, however he’s prepared to offer his full, hilariously annoying self to Olivia. His subsequent imprisonment later within the present has extra pathos than most (all?) of the romantic entanglements; Dinklage is just a pleasure to look at.

He and Nyong’o aren’t the one pleasure within the present; once they’re each offstage, there’s loads extra leisure from the gifted solid and within the present’s out of doors crispness. But Ali appears to emphasise the enjoyable of Twelfth Night slightly than complicate or totally interrogate it (regardless of one function, Sebastian’s devoted pal Antonio, given a extra romantic subtext by the non-binary performer, b). Just a few bits and items of scenic design seem and recede elegantly from under the stage, however the everlasting set is simply the letters spelling out WHAT YOU WILL – the play’s subtitle – on the rear of the stage, topic to some humorous sight gags however principally bringing to thoughts the Robert Indiana “LOVE” statue (or an Instagram station). The grand finale options an explosion of eye-filling costume design, however what does it must do with the remainder of the present, past the underdeveloped moments of gender efficiency?

Then once more, possibly it’s applicable that Shakespeare returns to Central Park with a reminder that his work may be pleasant enjoyable, particularly with a play that does consult with its personal stage-friendly qualities. “If this were play’d upon a stage now,” the character Fabian remarks at one level, “I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.” It could be exhausting to try this for this Twelfth Night. Nitpick, possibly, however not condemn; it’s completely possible that the crowds bearing their hard-won tickets could have a good time.