I had the extreme pleasure of seeing Bedlam's "Twelfth Night" and its sister "What You Will" this past week. Previously I had seen Bedlam's "Hamlet" and "Sense and Sensibility." What sets this company apart, far apart, is that they perform with an extremely limited number of actors. "Hamlet" was performed by three men and one woman, "Sense and Sensibility" by about eight(I don't remember the exact number) and the current "Twelfth Night" and "What You Will" by three men and two women playing mulitiple roles and crossing gender lines to do so. Both tellings of "Twelfth Night" are delightful and completely different stylistically.
"Twelfth Night" deconstructs the play with the actors performing in their own clothes and without props aside from a long wooden table and a couple of chairs. They mingle with the audience before, during and after the performance and the telling of the play feels off-hand, almost casual. Still, the audience is propelled along by the story and the frenetic energy of the ensemble. Viola and Cesario are played in this version by Eric Tucker, the director and also one of the founders of the company. Not so strange for a man to play Viola when one considers that in Shakespeare's day the female parts were played by boys.
"What You Will" is a more conventional, although stylized, interpretation of the play. It opens with the actors, dressed entirely in white, emerging from under a large white sail (and closes with the same). For the most part the women play the female roles and the men the male although Andrus Nichols, Bedlam's co-founder who plays Olivia here, does double up as Sir Toby who, in this version, is a woman. The pacing is elegant and beautifully blocked to allow for the constant changes in character by the five actors.
The casts for both plays are completed by Edmund Lewis who interprets Malviolio in two very different ways, Tom O'Keefe who does the same with Feste, and Susannah Millonzi as Viola in "What You Will" and Olivia in "Twelfth Night."
The company does play around a bit with Shakespeare's text but to good purpose and nothing of import is missing from either performance.
The two plays run through May 2nd at the Dorothy Strelsin Theater, 312 West 36th Street. Get your tickets soon because the theatre seats less than 100 people. Their website is theatrebedlam.org.
