‘Twelfth Night’ too focused on shtick

Watching busloads of high-school students entering the Nicholas Horn Theatre earlier this week to attend a production of the Utah Shakespearean Festival Education Department's "Twelfth Night," I was awed once again by the great author's longevity. The Bard wrote this script around 1601 for a specific London theater company. Yet, here it is 2009 Las Vegas, and he still is being introduced to new generations.

This production, though, makes me wonder what director Anne Tully thinks she's introducing high-schoolers to.

The company of eight performers travels to schools in four states, conducting workshops as well as shows. The selection of "Twelfth Night" is a smart one. The script is easy to enjoy. Like so many of Shakespeare's romantic comedies, it involves mistaken identities, misunderstood intentions and gender confusion.

Some of the actors are admirable, particularly Lillian Castro as an irreverent waiting woman, and a very strange, "Star Wars"-y priest. Castro is an attractively heavyset woman with broad facial features that allow her to communicate her every zany thought.

Tully makes two major mistakes with this 65-minute adaptation. She encourages the actors to play stupid in an attempt to make them funny. And she rids the tale of any kind of emotional darkness.

We begin, for example, by meeting Viola (Sarah Carlson-Brown) on an island following a shipwreck. Her brother is likely drowned, but this Viola is the calmest, most giddy grieving person you're ever likely to meet. Later, she impersonates a man, and you would think from the actress' frivolous attitude that she was just disguising herself to have some fun (she dons a male's wardrobe to survive).

The character of Malvolio -- a pompous male steward -- has a very serious, layered dramatic journey, and the script ends, peculiarly, with his vow for vengeance. But Ibesn Santos makes him nothing more than a cartoon twit. Sir Toby Belch (Vincent Carlson-Brown) gets a laugh by screaming in a high-pitched woman's voice during a swordfight. That sort of thing can be OK, but it's not OK when it's used to substitute for laughs inherent in the story and characters.

This "Twelfth Night" is at times pleasant and harmless, but it has little to do with Shakespeare. It smacks of condescension, as if to suggest high-schoolers can only appreciate slapstick and mugging. Why bother with a Shakespeare education program if you're going to mislead students into believing the man wrote only shtick?

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at DelValle@aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas, NV 89125.