‘If music be the food of love, play on,’ said Duke Orsino, who is hopelessly seeking the love of Lady Olivia, in the opening scenes of Shakespeare’s comedy, ‘Twelfth Night.’
As the pink evening light crept up the mountains above Sand Harbor and dusk gave way to the twinkling stars of the night, the drama, romance, and humor of Shakespeare came alive before an audience at the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival.
‘Twelfth Night’ tells the story of twins Sebastian and Viola who are separated after being shipwrecked and both believe the other is dead. Viola comes to shore at the foreign land of Illyria and takes on a male identity to become a page for the Duke Orsino. The Duke instructs Cesario, Viola’s male alias, to visit Lady Olivia on his behalf — a move that backfires on the Duke as Lady Olivia falls head over heels for Cesario. Meanwhile, Sebastian also lands on the shores of Illyria. And as the twins look so much alike, double identity and confusion follow.
The Duke loves Lady Olivia. Lady Olivia loves Cesario. Cesario, or Viola, loves the Duke. And Sebastian loves Lady Olivia. The twisted Shakespeare love story unfolds as the waters of Lake Tahoe lap on the beach.
After a collection of the works of Shakespeare last year, the 39th season of the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival is back with a full-length production.
‘We promised our faithful audience a return to ‘real’ Shakespeare last year—and we’re delivering on that promise,’ said Producing Artistic Director Charles Fee, in a press release. ‘I am thrilled to be directing this wildly funny, deeply moving play. Expect a lavish production with gorgeous costumes, stunning sets, and beautiful music — performed with wit and clarity by one of the most talented professional acting companies in the West!’
After seeing the performance myself, I caught up with Fee on the phone to ask him a few questions about the performance. Fee actually directs the Shakespeare play for three theater companies, the Idaho Shakespeare Festival in Boise, Idaho and the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland, Ohio in addition to Lake Tahoe. The partnership provides an economically stable and artistically viable business plan for the theaters and their productions.
‘I want to, and I think we can, continue to build this relationship [between the three theaters] over many years,’ Fee said. ‘We really hope people will come up and try a production of ours at Sand Harbor — it’s a great introduction to our work.’
Moonshine Ink: What do you hope audiences will take away from the performance of ‘Twelfth Night’?
Charles Fee: First and foremost, it’s the experience of one of the greatest plays that Shakespeare ever wrote. It’s funny, but it’s also very heartfelt and romantic. … It’s a beautiful play in a gorgeous setting.
MI: What does the venue at Sand Harbor bring to the performance?
CF: Sand Harbor brings a lot to every performance because it’s just such a spectacular venue. The experience of going to the show is also the experience of being in this incredible place. … To be able to look across at the lake while you’re listening to Shakespeare is pretty amazing.
MI: Why Twelfth Night?
CF: We knew we wanted to return to a full Shakespeare play. I wanted to come back to a comedy and a piece that was perfect for the setting and a piece that I love. It was pretty much as simple as that.
MI: Can you tell me about Twelfth Night and where it stands in relation to Shakespeare’s career?
CF: It sits in the middle of his career, right at the height of his work both in comedy and tragedy. Shakespeare had begun working on how to blend both comedy and drama. So you have a piece that is wildly funny, but in moments, is also quite dark.
MI: How do you adapt Shakespeare to a stage in today’s time? Do you modify the script at all? What techniques do you use to help people understand the dialogue?
CF: We don’t change the language in the text, ever, at all. … The language is exactly Shakespeare’s language. … People often misjudge Shakespeare’s language when they don’t see his plays very often. It is, in fact, our language. There’s nothing that’s that distant from us. … But it’s also poetry … and poetry is always in a dense, compact form.
It’s really no different in playing Shakespeare than in any acting. Our job is to first of all understand what we’re saying. We spend a lot of time on the text itself, understanding what that line means so that we can communicate the line through our physical being, our action on the stage. … It really is just hard work. But it’s fun work. And when you work on Shakespeare’s plays as much as we all do, you learn the plays, and it gets easier to understand the text and speak it.
