Twelfth Night at YaleRep Review

I saw YaleRep’s production of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, directed by Carl Cofield, last Wednesday, starring Moses Ingram as Viola, William DeMeritt as Orsino, and Tiffany Denise Hobbs as Olivia. The play is a comedy of mistaken identity. After being shipwrecked in the strange country of Illyria, Viola disguises herself as a man named Cesario to get a position working for Orsino, who has his heart set on marrying Olivia. While trying to court Olivia for Orsino, Viola falls for Orsino herself, and Olivia falls for Cesario. Things only get more complicated when Olivia’s twin brother Sebastian arrives and the other characters confuse him and Cesario for each other. Meanwhile, the play gets additional comedy out of a subplot involving Olivia’s family and servants messing with each other. It plays with themes of gender and class.
What makes this production unique is how it was influenced by the afrofuturism movement. This is obvious from the first scene, where Orsino is shown using a VR set that projects images of Olivia.

The other major uses of futuristic technology in the show are when VR is used in a second scene to torture Malvolio (a scene I found legitimately uncomfortable in a way that robbed it of its comedy), the voice effects applied to the fool Feste’s voice when he sings, and laser swords... well, swords with blinking lights on them accompanied by a constant swooshing sound effect that got grating after a while. There was also one small moment where the currency the characters use is shown, but from as high up as I was seated, it was hard to tell what it was, and it only came up in that one scene. As cool as the effects like the one in the image above were, I think it would have been cool to weave the futuristic technology into more of the show rather than just featuring it in big scenes and music numbers, even just in subtle ways.
But there’s also the “afro” part of afrofuturism to consider, and that’s where this production shines.

The earthly colors of the minimalistic set with the pleasing gradient of colored lights behind it, and the way parts of it effortlessly slide in and out of place, almost makes the set feel like a living, breathing thing. The architecture might have stolen all of my attention if not for the incredible costumes.

The costumes, with their bright colors and intricate patterns, were beautiful and elegant. Most characters had a signature color to make it easier to tell them apart; for example, Orsino’s suits are orange and Olivia’s dresses are dark blue, two colors whose contrast symbolize the distance between the two characters. 

The music in the show perfectly fits this aesthetic. It manages to sound not only futuristic, but also atmospheric and energetic. 

It’s difficult for me to pick my favorite actor from this production. In general the comedic scenes got more of a reaction out of me and the rest of the audience than the emotional one, which I believe to be a byproduct of it being a Shakespeare show; his complex dialogue can make it difficult to follow along with plot and pick up on subtle emotion, but with proper emphasis, it’s much easier to tell which bits are supposed to be funny. As such, the comedic actors left a greater impression on me in that sense. My favorite of them was probably Maria, since she at first appears to not want to put up with the other characters’ nonsense, but she reveals herself to be just as fun loving as the rest of them. My least favorite of them would be either Malvolio, mainly because his scene at the end of Act 1 dragged on for so long, or Fabian, who gets introduced later than the others for some reason and is essentially interchangeable with the rest.

However, I never really got attached to any of those characters. So in terms of forging an emotional connection while also still being comedic, my favorite characters would be either Viola or Olivia. As someone who usually doesn’t get much out of romance stories, I think they both managed to sell the moments where they realized their romantic feelings pretty well. Olivia’s progressively aggressive attempts to flirt with Cesario were amusing, and there was something about Moses Ingram’s performance as Viola - the initial naïveté with a sharp wit and effortless charm underneath, the sympathy she shows for other characters  - that had me routing for her the whole way through.