Hi, I'm Kevin Rich. I'm Director of Applied Shakespeare here at the University of Colorado Boulder, and I'd like to introduce you to Tim Orr Producing Artistic Director of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival and who is also directing Twelfth Night this summer. Tim, can you talk a little bit about how long you've been in this role and tell us a little bit about CSF. Sure, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival is a professional theater company in residence here at the University of Colorado Boulder. We are the second oldest Shakespeare Festival in America. We are now heading into our 60-seconds season, and we have produced every play in Shakespeare's cannon twice in our 62 years. So that's a lot of work and a lot of those titles we've produced nine or 10 times. We don't just produce Shakespeare, we produce non Shakespeare plays as well. But it's a professional company with actors, directors, and designers from all over the world who come to us. Excellent. So why Twelfth Night? Why Twelfth Night? How much time do we have? That is a big question. Well, I love the play. I think it's my favorite, I think it's my favorites of Shakespeare's comedies, and it might be my favorite of his plays. We had not produced Twelfth Night in about seven years. It's an extremely popular title. It works so well in a big outdoors. So we have two theaters. We have a big outdoor amphitheater, the Mary rip on amphitheater, and it seats a 1000 people and then we have an indoor stage as well, which seats 400. It's a more of your traditional, what you think of as a theater. Theater with a balcony in a stayed proscenium stage. But Twelfth Night works so well in either venue. It works well in any venue, but it works really well in a big amphitheater type space where you've got this beautiful language and a high-stakes for the characters and great comedy, music and pathos and all of it. So I love the play. I have really fun memories of it from past times that I've directed it and then as an actor. Excellent. What's your overall vision for this particular production this summer? For this particular production of Twelfth Night, I was really inspired by the shipwreck, by the sky and the ocean, the sea and because I knew we were producing it in our outdoor venue, the sky goes like this, right over the whole theater and it starts in daylight and as the sun sets, the theater naturally irises down to the stage with the darkness. It's something that I just kept coming back to it. So first of all, in my production I've swapped the first two scenes. In the play that you read, the first scene is Orsino, and he's has that famous speech, if music be the food of love, play on yada, yada. Then the second scene is the shipwreck in the storm and Viola being washed up onto the beach with the Sea Captain and she says, "What country friends is this?" So it's that and when I start thinking about the ocean and the sea, it is a town or a community that lives right there on the beach. So Orsino's house and Olivia's house are on the stage and right off their back porch, right off the back steps of their home. The rest of the stage is the beach, and the audience is the ocean. We can treat the audience as the ocean and we can further that sense of play in make believing that the audience is the ocean, like Viola in the shipwreck will be born out of the sea and born from the sea and born by the sea and coming from the audience. Throughout the rest of the play, we will find more ways of utilizing the audience as the ocean and creating that sense of play and fun, like remember when you played, ooh, hot lava. Yes. You can't go out there, you can't touch that because it's the ocean. I think there'll be plenty of opportunities for fun there. At the end Viola and Orsino can sail away up the aisle. Great. That's the vision forward. It'll also have this, like a child's story book. We're reading a lot of kids books at home right now and that sense of Wimsey and play and imagination that comes out of those books fits right in with Twelfth Night as well. I think that was where the idea came from. I want to hear you talk about music too, I know that you have a background in music and music factors into this play a lot. Can you talk about how you're using music in this production? Yes, so the character of Feste is a musician and he's asked and paid to sing a song every now and then. The big songs that he has are, O mistress mine, come away death and the wind and the rain at the end. He's got a couple other little snippets or catches of things that he sings in between. That was really important to me. I've written music for productions of Twelfth Night in the past and loved it. Had a wonderful time. It lifts the soul. It does two things. It elevates the production. It can create real fun and energy on stage with live music and everybody singing and dancing. But then, some of those numbers like come away deaf, can bring it down to the smallest point of silence and stillness as well. It really adds contours to the production. I hired an actor who was a composer as well to play Feste. He's writing all original music for it for him to perform in the role of Feste as well. That's exciting. What about this play in the context of other comedies? I can understand from a commercial point of view, companies sell. But in this chronology of Shakespeare's plays, this is one of the later comedies, it's darker, there is a sense of whimsy and fun, but there's also cruelty and violence and melancholy in the production. Can you talk about that? Yeah. Sure. Again, I want to say this is my opinion only and other Shakespearian professionals and scholars might disagree. But I think that if you do look at the early ones are super funny and slap sticky, but there are a lot of fluff. There's not a whole lot of meat on the bone in comedy of errors, but it's great fun. Midsummer Night's Dream, they get better, Taming of the Shrew is a great play but they start to really achieve, I think with as you like it and Twelfth Night are outstanding because they have everything. There's real story and character to explore. There's great comedy and great slapstick as well, music, and they really make us think and talk and discuss love. How we fall into love, how we fall out of love, the nature of it all, and then I think he starts to go more dark with Measure for Measure and Merchant of Venice and these other plays that are considered in the comedy category. I think Twelfth Night is right in that sweet spot of being a wonderful play for the audience and a wonderful exercise for artists. Excellent. Let's drill down on some specific design choices. Can you talk a little bit about what we're going to see this summer and how you're imagining the physical world of the play. I have learned that if you're not overly prescribing and detailed and micro managing the designers with your clear vision, if you're not overdoing that and give them plenty of blank canvas to work with, then you wind up with something much more interesting and much more creative because I'm not a set designer. So what I said to the designers, this was almost a year ago when we first started on this production, was here are the things that I need and here are the things that I'm not interested in and I would love to collaborate with you-all. I know that the idea of the beach, of it running down to the beach and the ocean, I know that this is a type, I'm not super obsessed with a specific time period like this is taking place in 1725 in Cuba or something. I know that this is a world where people are still carrying swords and they're carrying muskets. I want them to look great and trim in costumes. But it is not a super conservative world either. This is a world where they're comfortable taking their clothes off. So So it's not like high Edwardian collars and cuffs and skirts down to the floor or anything like that either. It's a warm, comfortable world, but it's a children's book world as well. It's partly pirates, and we know it's grounded in reality and it happened a long time ago, so it's turning out to look a little bit like Pirates of Caribbean. I think that's what it might be. In a way that Shakespeare started played fast and those with- Totally. You're not setting it in a really specific time. There's no statement I want to make about a particular time period where you look through a lens of history, not for this production. I want this to be a storybook. I want to unfold like a story. Specifically, I want younger audience members to lean in and beyond the edge of their seats and really connect with it as well. So we came up with this, it's a wonderfully wild world that they've created where it feels semi Mediterranean. Hopefully, we have images to show you. It's blue. The world is blue and gray. Orsino and Olivia's houses are mashed together. Yeah. We're right on, and there's a peer, and there's a boat on the stage and sand. That is the world that they're living in. Toby is ex-military. We can tell by his costume that he had some sort of military background, and it comes out in a lot of his language as well. Feste has traveled. We know that from his costume, that he's not necessarily restrict. He's from another place, and he has been around the world. Viola, as we know, is from another country, and so as her brother Sebastian, and so is Antonio. That they have come from some place else. Antonio is, in my world, is a professional mercenary, and comes into this world deeply in love with Sebastian. Yeah. So these kinds of character clues, they're are in the text, are what will help us and help the actors create their character, create their Malvolio, their Toby, their Antonio, their Viola. Excellent. Yeah. So I really like how you're talking about, as a director, you like to empower your designers by giving them room. So you have a couple of ideas, but nothing too prescriptive, so that they can contribute in their way. I know it's the same when it comes to the actors, right? You have specific ideas about the characters, but of course, you also cast actors who are going to bring the ideas. So I'm excited to talk about your ideas about the characters, and also why you made the casting choices that you did. Sure. Let's actually start. You mentioned that Feste was a traveler. I'd really like to hear you talk more about that. Sure. There's almost a magical quality to that character that I can see in the text. Because he moves freely from house to house, he appears at certain times. He seems to know things that other characters don't. He talks in riddles. He talks in Latin jokes and things which we don't get anymore. Also, there is a moment where he says to Viola when she's in disguise as Cesario, "I hope in your next life, God gives you a beard." Or something like that. You can play that with any line in Shakespeare. You can play it three different ways, which is what gives us so many infinite number of possible productions of these plays. But that sort of knowledge, that wink to her that he knows what's going on, just gives him that magical quality. So I can heighten that in costuming as well. But also, the actor who's playing the character is a polymath with instruments. He plays all different kinds, he's always pulling out a different instrument for every song. Nice. Sometimes it's a mandolin or it could be a dumbek from Africa, or it might be an accordion. They hadn't even been invented yet. So it ties it all together and makes that fun without providing any answers to the audience, which is what I like. Right. So that they can all go home and argue in the car. Yeah. About it. "Where did he get the accordion from?" Right. "Maybe he can travel through time." Nice. These kinds of things. Right. Yeah, that will definitely set him apart from the others and provide evidence that he has traveled. He says he's been gone. He returns home at the top of the play, right? Right. When Mariah says "Where have you been?" That's right. "Where have you been, we've been looking everywhere for you?" Where do you think he was? He doesn't give a straight answer. Right. He travels. Yeah. Learns, and picks up new instruments and learns new things. He's also the only character in the play, I think, with his head screwed on right. Everybody else in the play gets some kind of zany, does zany things and out of character, unpredictable things. It's a play full of semi lunatics, except for him, and he's the one who was called the fool, the clown. I think Shakespeare knew what he was doing. So he's got this quality like the stage manager in our town, or other kind of narrator type characters. Who's the guy in Hamilton who guides them through the whole story? Burr. Yeah. That kind of guide for the audience through the story. So it's kind of his play in your production? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He conjures the storm at the beginning. Like theatrically? Yes. It's him who will create the storm at the beginning, and it's him who wraps it up at the end with the wind and the rain, because he is the Lord of Misrule. That is Twelfth Night. At Twelfth Night, somebody would be elected the Lord of Misrule, and now it's your job to set the games and the mischief and the rebels for the party for the night. So that's his job. So he will be weaving through almost every scene, opening a door for somebody as just as they're making their entrance and closing it behind them, watching certain scenes from his moon window up high, things like that, and he is a participant in the bullying. But he does get caught up in it. He gets caught up in it. He is brought into the bullying and he goes along with it. He has personal reasons for it, he says. Just like everybody else, he's taking revenge.'Cause I think about this all the time, I also think as a traveler, he has changed. He is different, he maybe sees the world in shades of gray. He's there as a participant. He's not there to save your world or to help you or to save your story or to fix any of this. That's not my job. I'm just here to watch and comment on it all, which I hope makes the audience go," Hey, hey, hey, you should be part of the solution, not part of the problem." But that again, we will find in rehearsal just how Feste feels about it all. The actor will make those decisions. It's great. How about Toby? You mentioned Toby. You want us to see that Toby was a veteran. Yeah, I guess I did. Or is a veteran. That's my word. Veteran. Military background. Yes. But that's the definition, isn't it? Yeah. That's very interesting. I have been thinking military background because he knows how to handle himself. He knows how to handle a sword, he knows how to handle weaponry. Some of the language and the words that he uses indicates that. His name is Sir Toby Belch, so he is older than almost everybody else in the play, certainly older than lovers. He's a heavy drinker. He is an alcoholic. He loves the fun and the revels and the pranks and the games. But in my production, in my mind, he is the one who turns it into bullying, who takes it too far, who takes the prank too far, and ends up ruining lives. Not just Malvolio's, he ruins Sir Andrew and his prospect, any prospects that he had with the Olivia. He's creating these kinds of problems. That'll be again, something that we find in rehearsal that the actors, when they hear those clues in the lines to create their version of Toby. He knows how to handle himself with weapons. We know that. With a sword. Well, and that's why, because Toby throughout the play, it's all cakes and ale. Yes. When you said military background, I went straight to, are you investigating other skeletons in his closet that he's trying to numb himself from or am I projecting too much on that? I haven't thought of it. It's a good idea. Yeah. I think tricky territory. Yeah, but it sounds like you're just interested in explaining why he is able to fight when the time comes, even though he doesn't seem to be in the fighting shape for much of the play. What is it that's setting him apart from all the other characters? That makes him big, boisterous, loud, threatening, intimidating. All of those things add up to it. He is a knight. He is Sir Toby. He is above Malvolio. Malvolio challenges him face to face, and Toby should, I think, go into a rage because of it. He should, not only because he's being confronted, but also because he's drunk, but also because it's from a servant, somebody that he believes is beneath him. Right. That should set him off. So talk about that a bit, just that huge animosity towards Malvolio, you think it's a class thing? I do. [inaudible] It's a puritanical thing. He is referred to as a Puritan in the play, he is uptight, he has a butler servant who wants everybody to be quiet and stop drinking, and in Shakespeare's time, calling somebody a Puritan the audience would have instantly gone half, "Yeah, right, well, we've got one of those at home as well." So for the rest of them, and the play is called Twelfth Night, it's going to be about partying. Right. For him to try and shut it all down, it's like any 80's comedy movie where the dean wants the frat house to stop partying. So the dean gets eventually tossed into a giant lake or something like that, it's that same kind of comedic trope, I think. But Shakespeare turns it on it's head and takes it too far and we see his life, Malvolio's life ruined. His last line is, "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you," and how that actor chooses to play that line, and I've seen it done many different ways, will be very interesting because we'll only get there at the end of the rehearsal process. Right. Probably, I want to save that for the end of the rehearsal process. I also need to set up Malvolio earlier in the play as being unlikable, so that I can lure the audience into enjoying the mistreatments of him. Yes. Up and so that they are complaisant. Up until the point where it goes too far and hopefully the audience will go, "Boom, I was part of that.". That's great. So I really have to set him up early to be unlikable. That's great. Yeah. I think there's one more character that I want to talk about, no backup and talk about just casting in general, but you said Antonio. Yes. So you are casting a woman in the role of Antonio and changing the gender of the character to Antonio, can you talk about that a bit? Yeah. A number of great ideas led to that decision. The first is I consider Antonio to be a bad ass literally. I love the story, I don't even know if it's true, but it doesn't matter. But I've heard the story about Ben Johnson the playwright, contemporary of William Shakespeare's who, he's famous for the plays but also for killing a guy in a bar fight, but as I know the story, it was somebody in a bar, or an actor, or somebody who picked a fight with him not knowing that Ben Johnson in a previous life had been a mercenary fighting the Dutch for the English Army and he just quit killed the guy. Yeah. In this fight, and we see that story trope in films as well. So my thought is how cool it would be when Antonio comes in to bust up the fight that was about to happen between Viola and Sir Andrew that Toby is creating and Fabian is watching as well and laughing. If it's a woman, and the woman that we've cast, she's like five foot three here, or something like that, if she jumps into the middle of that and she is surrounded by men with swords, and who are all trying to attack her love, and as she just quickly, Jason Bourne all three of them without drawing her own sword, and then pulls a dagger and sticks Andrew to the wall as well, and has them all incapacitated. I thought that's a play I'd like to see. Yeah. I think that would be super cool, but then the other reason is we're producing Twelfth Night in rep with Romeo and Juliet, and I cast all the plays, and rep casting forces you sometimes to make casting decisions that you wouldn't immediately or logically go to, which can be great. So just a backup. So what you mean by, in rep, means that multiple productions share the same company of actors? Correct. It is the same company of actors doing Twelfth Night, that is doing Romeo and Juliet, and I needed to cast Juliet in Twelfth Night. Yes. I didn't want the same woman playing Juliet and Viola. Right. Because that's not interesting rep casting to me, it's not interesting for the audience. Yeah, right. It's too big a line load to put on one person to survive the whole season. So I have Juliet and I don't have another dude to play Antonio. Right. I'm like, that's great. I can totally make it work and it created more ideas. Right. That's the thing I love about rep casting, it forces you to be creative sometimes in ways and it makes you grow. Right. Limitations breeds creativity, right? Totally. So I'm hearing you, you've got very specific and exciting ideas about these characters who you've already cast with actors, right? It's probably a little bit of both, but did the casting of the actor inform your thoughts about the character in this production or were you looking specifically for actors to fill an idea you already had about the character? In a sense and in very few cases. Yeah. I know I wanted somebody who can do comedy in the role of Orsino. Not just a handsome dude, but somebody who can bring comedy to it. I knew I wanted for Viola, because it was an actor that we'd worked with last year. I know I'm just looking for quality. I'm looking for the quality of the actor and their ability to do multiple things. Because again, they're going to be in red. Casting somebody who is playing a clown in Twelfth Night, could be playing a heavy villain in Romeo and Juliet. So the range of skills. Yeah. So what were particular casting challenges this time around? This time around, well, you got to cast twins, or people who have a reasonably good close enough look to one another to play Viola and Sebastian. There are age ranges and differences of these characters in Twelfth Night that can make casting difficult, which is, I don't really want to see a man twice the age of a woman that he's chasing after because it's icky, it can't be to look at. So you've got Orsino who is in love with Olivia. Oftentimes, I've seen Orsinos in their 40s, close to 50, but Olivia needs to be falling in love with Sebastian, and Sebastian is a twin to Viola. So Viola and Sebastian can often be really young, and that's not a problem for Olivia to be able to look 10 years older than Sebastian, but Olivia can't be so young that it looks really icky if Malvolio is close to 60 and is chasing after a 25-year-old. So keeping the balance of all the ages of these characters can be really challenging, especially when you're casting them in Romeo and Juliet as well, right? So I'm conscious of that. The woman that I wanted for Viola, is African-American. We had a lot of conversations, now, does Sebastian need to be African-American? They're supposed to be twins, but can we just let go of that? But then I'm thinking,"The play is already complicated enough. I'm already asking a lot of the audience to keep up in heightened language. So shall I make it easier on them and cast African-American Sebastian as well?" But then we strive for diversity all over the cast, throughout the whole cast as well, so that's important as well because I don't want the only two characters who are coming from another country to be African-American. So we're trying to reach for diversity across the whole company, but we want to give good thought to how we're telling the story when we do that. We're standing on the precipice of a much longer and interesting conversation about the metatheatricality that's like in the DNA of these plays, right? Totally. Shakespeare was writing for actors of one gender to play a character of another gender who then would, right? So that conversation about race in Shakespeare's plays, color-blind casting versus color-conscious casting is a really interesting one to have, and what I'm hearing you say is that you are interested in a consciousness of the race of characters in the play. Yes, because we have in this play foreigners. Right. Viola and Antonio, and Sebastian are from another country and they're coming into this country and they're hiding. So I want to have a diverse cast, but I don't want to create new problems with the casting. I want to be conscious of the story that I'm telling. I want it to be colorblind, so I have to be conscious about it. Right. That's great. So how about Viola? Yeah, I'd love to hear, you mentioned having an actor in mind for that role. Or so it sounds like that role is pretty central to your vision of the play, as well as Feste. Yes, Viola is quite central to the play. I love the character, and I love the idea that this young woman washes up onto a shore and Is a stranger in a strange land and she grieves and worries about it for maybe 30 seconds and then says, "All right. Let's roll up our sleeves, let's figure it out." I think that's so cool. Yeah. She is going to figure it out and she's going to survive, and she's going to move forward through all of this, and she doesn't know what tomorrow is gonna bring, but she's going to figure out today. So yeah, and that's another great reason, I think, to start the play with the shipwreck, because you're starting with Viola. I think the play really is centrally about her journey. I said, she's there for 30 seconds and then she, okay so she's a stranger in a strange land. The stakes aren't high enough. I don't think so. What we will work on in the play is, what if this is a, you have heard of what if this is a very dangerous place for a woman to be alone in. I think that's why she disguises herself as a boy, I think is for her own safety because she knows that she's a woman and she's alone in this country that she has heard about. It could be all wrong what she's heard about it. But nonetheless, she is going to survive and figure it out and she does. She's wily and she's crafty. She doesn't always tell the truth, and she doesn't always do the most logical thing, but she is alert in the moment and is highly intelligent and well-educated and argues great points with Olivia and with Orsino. So there are all of the characters in the play at some point make a choice where I think it makes the audience go, that was out of character. Why did they do that? That's the genius of Shakespeare is I can imagine sometimes a group of producers sitting around a table looking at one of these scripts and going, no, it's out of character, wrong. They would never do that. Why would they do all of these things first and then do that? That's because human beings are complicated people. Yes. Unpredictable. That's what makes these stories interesting, and particularly for Viola. So yeah, I love this. A major theme of this play is Identity, right? Shakespeare as a man of the theater, so many of his characters are actors themselves. Yes. They're pretending to be someone else. Yes. Talk a little bit about I don't know, the discoveries that Viola makes when she is pretending to be someone else, right? Yeah. The moment between Viola, as Orsino and Orsino. The most say that again. The moment where? When between Orsino and Orsino. Right. I think there's just a lot to mine in terms of. Yeah. Shakespeare's exploration of identity in this play. Yeah, I love it when she is disguised as Orsino, she almost instantly becomes worse. He knows favorite. But I think there's great comedy to mine in there with Valentine and curio. But we've been here for years. That's nice. We've never been invited for a drink with you. Yeah. But also as Orsino she suddenly gets privy to these conversations that happened between men that she may never have been involved or privy when presenting as a woman. So she takes exception to a lot of it. I think she's so remarkable because you can tell in those, she's not a servant in her homeland where her home country, wherever she's from. This is all new to her as well. The identity of being a servant. I think that can be really interesting and funny as well. But when she goes to meet Olivia, Olivia is totally taken aback by this messenger who speaks so directly to her and confrontationally and challenges her and she starts to fall for it. It's coming from a young man as well. This Intelligent, well-thought out arguments. She tries to pay her with a coin at the end and says, Orsino goes, I've never been paid to do anything in my life, right? For that response to it which I think is really cool as well. Olivia is even more like, ''You don't even want the coin.'' It's that sense of class. Yes. Or nobility that Viola has while being disguised as a servant that I think is really will create a lot of fun. It speaks to what you were saying earlier about how Shakespeare's characters change or have the capacity to change and behave in ways that are quote, unquote out of character because there perhaps because they're playing a different role. I think it must have been hilariously funny in Shakespeare's time, Viola would've been played by a young man. Right. Playing a woman who was then disguising herself as a man. Right. It's being played by a man. I think that'll be a fantastic acting challenge. It must have been hilarious for the audience. Well, so how about Olivia? Yeah. That's a tricky one. Olivia is a tricky character because she's in mourning. It's not a fun great place to start from for an actor and then very quickly falls in love. She starts the play saying, "I'm not, I will not entertain any thoughts of romance" and then on a dime she falls for [inaudible]. It takes a lot of time in rehearsal than in the productions that I've been involved with. You pick it apart and talk about it and work on it a lot in rehearsal to find a way into it. But I think a lot of the help needs to come from Viola. In being so challenging, so Intelligent, having a real conversation and having a meaningful conversation about love. But then, if Olivia goes too far with Wacky chasing Viola over the furniture, trying to get at her or something then it kind of falls apart. Right. Then it becomes a different play. Right. I don't think that really works. You're wanting that relationship to be, I don't know, authentic or plausible. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, we are making a comedy. This is supposed to be a comedy. I have to be reminding myself of that because I love to fall down deep into these rabbit holes of conversation and the human behavior and stuff. But at the end of the day, it's a comedy. Yeah. Yeah. There are a lot of levels. I love the moment though at the end of the play when Viola and Sebastian finally meet each other again. Yes. Somebody says, "two voices, two faces and two husbands" or something like that and Olivia says, "most wonderful". Yes. It's always nowadays been turned into kind of a baddie. Yeah. I have two. You have two to husbands now. Yeah. I don't think that's what it is and I think she got her brother back, Olivia. Yeah. I didn't. Yeah. She's like, that's not her fault. I don't know how I pulled that off. I got to move a line like two pages later. Yeah. In order to pull that off. That's brilliant. That's all, thank you. But that's to me, I think what she's after, is that sort of connection again to somebody, anybody. We'll talk about that in rehearsal and hopefully figure it out. Yeah. That is something that they share in common throughout most of the plays that they both lost a brother. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But at the end, Viola gets hers back. Yeah. Olivia doesn't. It's really powerful. Yeah. But she does get that brother, in a husband. I think that's what that most wonderful can really be about. I asked earlier why Twelfth Night, and now I'll ask why Twelfth Night today? I'd like for you to talk about the challenges of presenting the show or the relevance of this show for a 21st century audience. Yeah. I think the Malvolio's story-line is really relevant right now. I think that Viola is like the central story, link in Twelfth Night. But I think Malvolio is the hardest role. I think he's got the longest arc, I think he's got the most to do, I think he's got the most interesting stuff to do, but he's a victim of bullying and of practical joking and pranks taken too far. When we did a school version of Twelfth Night couple of years ago that toured around, the story was like we were talking about, it really was Malvolio's story of how he can get picked on and galled and all of that kind of stuff to the point where he says, "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you" and walks out and leaves. It's really powerful resonant for a younger audience. What that means, but I also love in Twelfth Night, gender fluidity of the identities of Viola changing and being in disguise and she has a boy, is falling in love with Orsino and Orsino is falling in love with him as well. It's a surprise to Orsino and I think that's really cool and amazing for a 400-year-old play. I mean, it's there in the text, but then on the other side of her falling in love with Olivia as well. That is to me, and then reaching for a really diverse cast as well makes it a great play to produce right now. Wonderful story to explore love in every different direction. That feels, I don't know, surprisingly contemporary. Yeah. I want to pick up on what you mentioned about Malvolio, and the school tour. So Colorado Shakespeare Festival has a nationally recognized touring program throughout the year that so uniquely pairs Shakespeare plays with violence prevention workshops. As I understand, Twelfth Night was the very first production and you directed that production. So can you talk a little bit about that production. You already started to, but I'd like you to elaborate a bit just about what that has become. Yeah, certainly. So this was a production of Twelfth Night that was only, I think, 40 minutes long done with three actors playing all the characters. We cut a lot of characters out of it obviously. But we would come into schools, they would set up like a tent, that was the set. But the story, we followed Malvolio a little bit more and the notes and the letters that get passed back and forth, were all done on cellphones. So there would be somebody backstage, we had a little thing with a, "ding, " like that and he'd pull out his phone and he goes, "Oh this is my lady's text." and he would read it and suddenly, everybody, all the kids in the audience would go, "Wait, what?". They would all now start watching it like this and he would read and scroll and then "ding," another one would come in and he'd read and scroll and "ding," and he's getting completely suckered by his friends over there, Toby and Andrew, who are sending, Mariah, who are sending these fake Facebook messages or fake tweets. He's falling down this rabbit whole of falling in love and then he is humiliated at the end and says that line of, "I'll be revenged on the whole park of you," and walks out of the cafeteria and good. I mean the kids recognized that completely. As a thing that happens everyday. As a thing that happens every day. Yeah. So when you talked about Malvolio in the context of the production this summer, you said that you're interested in the audience being complicit. So leaning into the fact that Malvolio is not likable, at least at the beginning, right? Is that a different approach than what you did with the touring show or were you also interested in that? I was. I guess because the whole idea of revenge. So a character might not be likable, but that's not the same thing as they had it coming for them, right? Right. Right, like so you want to create a reason for us to become complicit but not necessarily send the message that that kind of cruelty is deserved. Correct. Yes, Malvolio is unlikable by his other characters, colleagues around him, and he is mean, and he says some mean things, but that doesn't mean he deserves what he got. I mean they should be capable of making those distinctions and those decisions and I would like to take credit for this; not my idea, it was Shakespeare's, is to make the audience laugh and laugh and laugh all the way up through that letter scene where he gets that fake letter and [inaudible] swear my heart, and all of that and he's talking to the audience. I really think that the audience is Malvolio's only friend and he's talking directly to them saying, "Look, somebody who loves me." and the audience is going, "Oh, wait a minute. We known that you're being suckered." I think it's in that moment where it kind of turns a little bit. But Malvolio's still happy. He's the happiest he's ever been his life and the audience is going, "Eew." Yeah. Yeah. Do you think he genuinely loves Olivia or I mean, again, there's no right answer here. I've seen a number of different ways on-stage, but is the love genuine or does Malvolio seen it just as a way for him to rise above his station if he were to marry Olivia? That's such a good question. I'm going to leave that to the actor. Right, you haven't started rehearsal yet. I haven't started rehearsal yet. From a story-telling point of view, I think it's more interesting if there is a spark in him of love and humanity and I was talking about this recently with my wife and that it may not be a sexual thing at all for Malvolio. It could just be, "I'm finally seen by somebody." Right. I mean, there are four, if I'm not wrong, there are four characters in Twelfth Night who had a thing for Olivia, right? Malvolio, Aguecheek, Sebastian and Orsino. Yes. Everyone loves Olivia. Everyone loves Olivia. But do they or is it, because clearly, Shakespeare is interested in, what is love and what does infatuation, all the different reasons that you might want to marry someone. Yeah, and so like that's something that is interesting. Are they interested in her for the same reasons or for different reasons? That is such a great question. Yeah. They all have to be interested in her for different reasons, I think in order for this to be really entertaining. Yeah. Andrew is just an idiot, but he's lovable, and he's rich. That's the thing, I think he's really wealthy. Yes. Which is why Toby keeps him around? Which is why Toby keeps them around. Yes. So for Andrew, his attraction to Olivia should be different. You mentioned Andrew, and so now I want to ask you a little bit about the variety of clown or full figures in the play, Andrew, Feste - He's another one who gets Belch, Mariah. Yeah, Andrew is another one who gets totally bullied, pushed around, and suckered by Toby. Yeah, manipulated. Manipulated by Toby. He's the other practical joke that they're running him and Mariah, and Mariah and Fabian at some point they go, "You know what? This is Toby, this is far enough." Right. "We're now in deep," and Toby says, "No, we're going to continue." Yes. "All the way". Yes. Toby is like, "All right." That's good. But Andrew, Andrew was this another little satellite orbiting around all of these stories, I think doing his own goofy thing, and gets pulled in to the chaos, the sameness of the scenes, and yeah, he doesn't come out great in the end either. It doesn't end well for about half the characters. Well, I was- In the play. Yes. [inaudible] great. I was, actually that was the last question I had for you, how are you going to handle the resolution of the plot in terms of the fact that, it's not a comedy. No. For half of them. Right. Yeah. Right. So the ending is big and complicated, and the ending is with Feste again, and we have just seen 10 lines from the end, we have seen Malvoleo offer that chilling threat, and walk out and then all of a sudden Orsino says, "Will you be my bride? We're not leaving Olivia, we're going to have a wedding right now in Olivia's house." Olivia says, "Yes, it's all for you and then Feste starts singing the wind and the rain. Yes. So we need to, it's a slightly melancholic note that the play, that last little Orsino speech is ending on, "That bubble needs to burst, and everybody need to realize, we're about to have a wedding, we're about to get married." His song, wind and the rain starts, and like, "There'll be a celebration of sorts, and then every thread is going to start unraveling, and leave, everybody's story-line will start to leave the stage except Malvolios. We don't see him again, but Violet and Orsino are going to start their life as a married couple, so is Olivia and Sebastian, and Tonia, I think, is heartbroken. Right. Toby and Mariah have just gotten married off stage as well, but he is broken, and their story needs to pass through as well. We don't know what's going to happen to their marriage. Andrew, who is heartbroken and bandaged as well. Yes, and injured. He's leaving. He's going home. He's given up because he also is heartbroken by seeing Olivia there. So he's headed off that way, and I think Fabian is there to take care of Antonio or to at least help her or leader her off. Fabian has also been kind of an unwitting partner in all of this, I think all of those story-lines will depart until Feste is there and saying, "There, you had your rebels, are you happy?" Blackout. Did you really want me to play that song at the top of the show? Are you regretting that? Right. Now, because of the storm and that it created and all of these stories and all of this. But now our play is done. Yes. That's what I'm hoping will happen. Excellent. Fine I'll be excited to check in with you on other side. Yes. Because you're rehearsing the play to see what you learned and what, cool. That's, I mean, that's life. Yeah. That's, I mean, that's what this play is. Yeah. Yeah. I love the idea about Feste, it is life, but as you say, it's a story. You want to unfolded as a story, maybe to give us the distance to find the truth in it. So yeah, I'm really looking forward to seeing it. Thanks for your time today. My pleasure.
