Seattle Shakes Spikes the Punchbowl for Twelfth Night

Everyone's nose is a little out of joint in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night--and their hearts, livers, and spleens don't feel quite right, either. Shakespeare's play was written for the celebration of Twelfth Night, which marked the end of a monumental party season that began around Halloween, and it has a dyspeptic, roiled-stomach atmosphere. People are always blearily double-checking the evidence of their eyes, and ordering another round.

Seattle Shakespeare's production of Twelfth Night (through December 27, tickets: $22-$36) gets you into the party spirit with a wassailing bunch of Dickensians--judging from Malvolio's rendition of "La donna è mobile" later (from Verdi's Rigoletto), it's sometime after 1850. They invite the audience to a game of wits and to sing a round, and just when you're accustomed to Dickens' London, the play "begins" and you are in Illyria. It's a fun bit of business, but it's also very much in the seasick spirit of the play, which opens in the aftermath of a shipwreck.

Director Stephanie Shine inverts the first two scenes, actually, so that Viola (Susannah Millonzi) appears first, bemoaning the loss of her brother in the wreck, and disguising herself as a boy (a eunuch, in fact, which would explain her voice) before infiltrating Count Orsino's court. For the next two and a half hours, Viola (now Cesario) carries lovesick Orsino's gassy love poetry to the gravesick Olivia, a job Millonzi has Viola clutch at like a piece of post-traumatic driftwood.

Orsino (José Rufino) is stuck on spoiled little Goth girl Olivia (Brenda Joyner) because he's a bit of a masochist (Rufino writhes in anguished ecstasy), but at least he's nobility. Olivia's steward Malvolio (John Bogar) is just interested in having Olivia's whole estate under his sway. A good half of the play is devoted to the machinations of servant Maria (Carol Roscoe), Olivia's uncle Sir Toby Belch (Ray Gonzalez), and the fool Feste (Chris Ensweiler), as they teach Malvolio not just a lesson, but how scapegoating really works.

Once again, Seattle Shakespeare has put their money into the players onstage (six are Actor's Equity), and it pays off with some outstanding acting in both major and minor roles. If Millonzi doesn't end up with PTSD, her Viola could spark imitations.

Gonzalez' Belch and Roscoe's Maria cry out for a sitcom spinoff, and Darragh Kennan, as Olivia's completely unsuited suitor, Andrew Aguecheek, turns drollery into a confection. Bogar's Malvolio seems to think he invented self-regard. In a minor miracle, Ensweiler finds something fun in Feste's fascination with wordplay--a Greek nomad whose sense of reality's ambivalence clashes with Saxon fact.

The hand guiding all this talent is Stephanie Shine's, and while she sometimes goes for the joke at the expense of dramatic context (the reluctant duel between Aguecheek and Viola is hilarious enough, but Shine adds a serenading Spanish guitarist in silhouette), the rest is deft. The play races along, despite its actual length, and ends, as the best do, too soon.