"Twelfth Night" at Court Theatre is about attitude and irony instead of about romance or comedy. Under the direction of Karin Coonrod, the sweetest and funniest of Shakespeare's plays is neither.
The director seems to specialize in distancing devices, beginning with costume design apparently cribbed from the Rat Pack: stiletto heels and crinolines on the women, open-necked ruffly tuxedo shirts on the men. These succeed in evoking the Las Vegas section of the Godfather trilogy but don't comment in any useful way on the play. Add to this the use of cartoonish white makeup on characters who are not clowns, and a mysterious three-minute musical pause at the end of the first "movement," and characters roaming the audience urging people to take their seats so they can get on with it, and you have the triumph of concept over meaning, except for the fact that we never find out what the concept is.
The actors do the best they can, breaking through the thicket of constraints imposed on them with an effort that's almost visible. Kate Fry makes a wonderful Viola, convincing us against all odds that she's fallen in love with the languid Orsino (Lance Baker) and that her persona as Cesario the page is so irresistible that both Orsino and his hoped-for lady Olivia fall in love with her. Initially Olivia (Carey Peters) repulses sympathy, largely because she's hidden behind a veil and left with nothing to do but sashay around the stage conveying arrogance. Yes, yes, I get it -- another distancing device -- but why handicap an actress by depriving her unnecessarily of the use of her face? Freed of the veil, Peters warms up, and she is both comic and tender by the time she unknowingly transfers her affection to Viola's twin Sebastian, played with pitch-perfect earnest confusion by Guy Adkins. Orsino is the weakest of the lovers, sulky and pallid and directionless. As a friend remarked, "I'm sorry, Christopher Walken is not my idea of a hero." Perhaps Coonrod is deliberately calling attention to Shakespeare's having written the men far more thinly than the women. But she makes nothing of this interesting observation, and by itself it's unlikely to win many friends among the playwright's fans.
Yet the romantic side of the play works better than the comic: the production is simply not funny. Bradley Mott (as Sir Toby Belch) and Yasen Peyankov (as Sir Andrew Aguecheek), both able comedians in other contexts, barely evoke a single laugh. Feste, Olivia's fool (Larry Neumann, Jr.), makes a point of humorlessness, trying to pass off an unmotivated bitterness as wisdom. The one comic bit that works -- a vulgar play on the expression "Hold thy peace" -- is beaten to death. With some opportunities to clown alone, veterans Barbara Robertson (as Maria) and John Reeger (as Malvolio) are a bit more successful, but even they can't carry the entire show on their backs.
Twelfth Night, a play written for a celebration, should be done as a celebration. But as the clown said to the killjoys in the movie Holiday, "You've managed to turn it into a first-class funeral."