1999
Twelfth Night
Directed by Robert S. Currier

• Producer's Perspective
• Cast and Production Staff
• From the Playbill
• What the Critics Said

Producer’s Perspective

Twelfth Night is a great Shakespearean comedy. Almost all of the characters are fully realized and complex; it is full of laughs, but tinged with darkness; and it is an audience favorite. So it has been done frequently and in many different ways.

I remember when Bob got the idea for his production. We were down in Baja in a little town called El Cardonal on the Sea of Cortez in the middle of nowhere. (This was when we used to escape to Baja, before we were conscripted by the locals in Los Barriles to spend our ‘vacation’ each year producing a Shakespeare play with them as the actors.) We were pacing around the sandy, cacti-covered yard outside our Cardonal house, trying to get at what it was about Twelfth Night that spoke to us. And somehow, Bob came up with the idea that the world of Twelfth Night was much like the post-World War I era.

Many of the characters have gone through sadness and experienced death. Yet Toby and crew, like the Flappers of that era, are holding onto life, and seizing all the pleasure they can wring out of it. And then Bob found the image of Feste with a World War I gas mask. And that was eventually how we saw him when he made his first entrance. It was an eerie image, that odd fool’s mask with its overtones of senseless death.

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