Summary 
Colorfully staged and modernized to a seacoast town apparently in the post-Civil War American south. An on-stage musician plays a variety of string instruments and provides vivid sound effects, and the eccentric characters are distinctive and well played, but with little chemistry or dramatic weight. A handsome entertainment focuses on Malvolio, and like an earlier production from the same director, features a puritanical concluding vengeance that plunges the play - and the dramatic world - into silence and darkness.
Design
Directed by Michael Pennington. Set by Donald Eastman. Costumes by Nan Zabriskie. Lights by Kevin Rigdon. Sound by Robert Neuhaus. Original music by Alaric Jans.
Cast
Henry Godinez (Orsino), Timothy Browning (Valentine). Elyse Mirto (Viola), Howard Witt (Toby Belch), Sarajane Avidon (Maria), Frank Farrell (Andrew Aguecheek), Ronald Keaton (Feste), Lisa Dodson (Olivia), Greg Vinkler (Malvolio), Kurt Naebig (Fabian), Christopher Gerson (Sebastian), Ned Schmidtke (Antonio), Charles Constant (Priest).
Analysis
Michael Pennington's conclusion to Twelfth Night at Shakespeare Repertory is very similar to his surprise ending of the same play with his English Shakespeare Company at the International Theatre Festival of Chicago in 1992. The humiliated Malvolio, dressed in a formal black business suit, returns with a literal vengeance. He sweeps commandingly up the center aisle of the theatre, resembling a hyper-dignified impresario with his fur-fringed overcoat across his shoulders. Greg Vinkler's memorable Malvolio, sniffing and pompous with moral empowerment, stares down the previously confident singing clown Feste, who bows in suddenly meek subservience, then Malvolio snaps his fingers to bring an abrupt blackout. The conclusion amuses but with a tone of ominous foreboding, especially because in Shakespeare's time the London theatres were approaching the enforced closing of their doors by the Puritan city council. Apart from this concluding moment, Pennington's two Twelfth Night productions bear little resemblance to one another: the 1992 production was more an ensemble English comedy of manners, stylized and razor-sharp, while this production focuses on a disparate mix of colorful characters with emphasis on Malvolio, staged with a fashion sense that recalls the post-Civil War American south.
Vinkler's posing Malvolio is an insufferable hambone, his struts and sneers as exaggerated as the behavior of the holiday revelers he struts past and sneers at. Chin up and chest out, with ramrod-erect posture, he exudes a brazen dignity and infuriating sanctimonious self-importance: during the letter scene, he waves a handkerchief at an upstage bench daintily before sitting up on it, brandishes a brandy snifter, and comically resists the temptation to "revolve." The audience-pleasing performance provides the heart of Pennington's Twelfth Night, with the slew of attractive lovers and delightful drunkards running riot in splashes of peripheral color. Malvolio's rather harsh comeuppance - blind-folded and bound by heavy ropes within the horror of a sanitarium - is avenged with the self-satisfied lights-out conclusion.
Pennington stages his Illyria like a wealthy southern American seacoast city in the mid-to-late 1800s. Orsino's and Olivia's well-appointed homes, ornate and luxurious in dark wood, suit their characterizations well - handsome, sophisticated, more than a little self-indulgent - although the post-Civil War American south fails to correlate comfortably with the theme of Puritan influence over everyday life. Still, the seaside staging - with its upstage passage to an oft-utilized park bench - and costuming along with affected southern American drawls are fresh and engaging, nicely enhanced by an original score. The southern-style music, played onstage by a one-man band in Jay Voss, features accordion, guitar, stand-up bass, fiddle and violin, even some familiar but hard-to-identify down-home instruments like a musical saw, a cow bell and a whistle. Sir Andrew Aguecheek speaks with a comically thick southern drawl, and the Irish-American crooning song-man Feste, a comical eyesore in a tattered suit with a black top hat and flaming red gym sneakers, is played as a gentle old man, sitting beside Cesario to playfully trade witty little jibes.
Elyse Mirto portrays an ingratiating and very young Viola with wide-eyed wonder, tucking her blonde hair beneath a jaunty beret and wearing a shirt and vest to conceal her identity and sexuality. Mirto, already endearing with her expressive nature and vulnerable circumstance, further wins the audience with her attempts to disguise her girlish glee and youthful crush on Orsino. When the Duke gives Cesario a manly embrace and playfully chucks "her" on the chin, Mirto's Viola becomes weak-kneed and struggles to control herself, and later, when they sit side by side on a cushioned bench to listen to a romantic Feste love song, Orsino takes one of her hands in his, and she must clutch the chair with her free hand to restrain her passion. Orsino, swarthy and Latin and sophisticated, wears curly black hair very long in the back and has a penchant for blousy white shirts that reveal his chest. As the production begins, he wields a candelabrum and one by one he slowly snuffs each candle's flame, calling for an end to the music and his misery, before making his realization: "if music be the food of love, play on!" Languid and lethargic, Orsino embraces a cushion as if it is his lover and reclines in slow-motion misery, but when it is announced that Olivia has arrived, he races about the set with comic schoolboy puppy love. Similarly, Olivia wears funereal black and in her first appearance marches in a slow funeral procession beside the stern Malvolio, then writes demurely at her writing desk in scholarly seclusion. Once smitten with Cesario, however, Olivia erupts into a dancer's ballet-like twirls before collapsing with exhaustion into her bedside chair, and she later emerges in an elaborate cream-colored gown that contrasts with the stark darkness of her somber funeral clothes.
Pennington graces the production with colorful characters - Toby a dissipated and weary old country gentleman who gives the nighT-shirted Malvolio a painful wedgie; a matronly and portly Maria seeking some excitement as well as the hand of Sir Toby; and a pirate-like Antonio, like a Musketeer in scarves, boots, feathered hat, and curved cutlass, seeming to have developed a genuine homoerotic crush on the young Sebastian - and the pace is quick and entertaining. The color and pacing, however, give the production a superficial feel - almost something like a cartoon - and there is little chemistry or drama in the interaction between most of the characters and therefore little sense of the darkness and foreboding - the hard edge of reality and consequences - that haunted Pennington's superb 1992 production. Still, this production entertains at a high level, and the penultimate moment, with Viola finally reunited with her brother Sebastian in an embrace captured within a shimmering spotlight, is both charming and moving, the remainder of the cast watching and smiling from upstage. Feste croons another tender ballad, extending the happiness of the reunion moment before Malvolio makes his concluding appearance to literally silence and darken the stage.