'Tis with him in standing water, between boy and man

The very short review of the Actors' Shakespeare Project's Twelfth Night: Nigel Hawthorne is still my definitive Malvolio, but Allyn Burrows does some amazing things with the steward's runaway love-confidence, not missing how quickly it turns from slapstick to something almost too painful to watch. Steven Barkhimer's Feste seems to have about his person more musical instruments than his dilapidated carpetbag should account for; he wears a long, salt-stained trenchcoat whose motley patches are travel stickers, the stamps and postcards of his wanderings, Illyria one more port of call. (He has, too, the incredibly rare gift of making the fool's perpetual wordplay sound like actual improv, the riffs and zigzags he thinks in with or without an audience. Possibly this is the reason he can see through "Cesario"—less logical ideas than a sister in brother's guise are bouncing around in his head all the time.) The sea is everywhere in this production. It marks the separated twins most strongly, their white summer suits streaked a seaweedy green at the cuffs and shoulders like memories of drowning, tumbling end over end in the ship-wrecking sea. To stage right is a green-and-black breaking wave down which Viola and Sebastian are flung in opposing directions with the shock of the storm; it's a waterslide to Sir Toby, but Sir Andrew Aguecheek loses his footing constantly (as will the more serious characters when their emotions catch them off guard). A thin channel of water lies across the stage, dividing everything. A little patch of sand is the beach Malvolio retreats to, to get away from the rising, undoing tide. The cast doesn't need to lean on the lines for the audience to hear how much water there is in the language: For he's in the third degree of drink, he's drowned. I would have men of such constancy put to sea. And water once a day her chamber round with eye-offending brine. But mine is all as hungry as the sea. I wouldn't call it my favorite version of the play ever, but a very good way to start a birthday. I was born at eleven-fifteen in the morning. I still say after midnight counts.