Prescott Valley’s Main Street Theatre is dusting off its corsets and polishing its masks for a community production of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, a play that has delighted audiences for more than four centuries with its blend of farce, romantic confusion and bittersweet insight into love and loneliness.
Prescott Valley Performing Arts brings the play’s themes and central devices (gender disguise, improbable reunions, and comic revenge) to the local stage, where first-time Shakespeare-goers and seasoned theatre-lovers can relish a lively, human performance.
At its heart Twelfth Night is a clockwork of cross-purposes. Viola, shipwrecked and believing her twin brother Sebastian drowned, takes the male disguise of Cesario and enters the service of Duke Orsino. Orsino sends his new page to woo the grieving Countess Olivia on his behalf, only for Olivia to fall for Cesario, while Viola (in disguise) is falling for Orsino. Confused yet? Include a buffoonish would-be suitor, a gulling plot that targets the pompous steward Malvolio, and a surprise reappearance or two, and you have a comedy that switches from slapstick to melancholy with Shakespeare’s characteristic nimbleness.
Director Clay Smith credits his love of Shakespeare to his high-school English teacher, and Twelfth Night remains one of his favorites. He says he’s very excited to introduce Shakespeare to a new audience, agreeing that Shakespeare’s works tend to be simplified into digestible descriptions, but that a live presentation can change how one has previously interpreted a play that we’ve only read previously. “There’s this idea that there’s something pure and stiff about it because it’s famous and old, and because people tend to act it as stiffly as possible. Shakespeare really has nothing to do with purity. It’s very raucous, very bawdy and very all about entertaining people.”
Shakespeare’s comedy translates well to community theatres in part because of its mixture of broad physical comedy and quiet emotional truth. The gulling of Malvolio — where the steward is pranked into believing Olivia loves him, leading to one of theatre’s most deliciously humiliating scenes — is pure theatrical candy for small, energetic ensembles. At the same time the play offers tender, liminal moments: Viola’s private grief, Orsino’s self-indulgent melancholy, and the way music and song underline both pleasure and ache. These shifts from high color to interior feeling are something Main Street Theatre’s intimate house can amplify: the actors’ faces are close, the laughter immediate.
Twelfth Night has been a magnet for major directors and actors on the international stage. In the early 2000s Sam Mendes staged a high-profile Twelfth Night at the Donmar Warehouse with Emily Watson as Viola — a production that traveled widely in critical conversation and showcased how a director’s clarity can make Shakespeare feel very modern and intimate at once.
In recent decades the role of rigid, self-important Malvolio has attracted heavyweight performers keen to explore its dark center. Simon Russell Beale, Patrick Stewart and Derek Jacobi have all taken on the character in notable stagings, demonstrating how even the play’s comic figures can reveal unsettling psychological depth.
A night at Main Street Theatre for Twelfth Night is a chance to see Shakespeare’s most humane comedy in a setting where laughter is contagious and surprises feel personal. For families and first-time theatregoers the play’s plot is straightforward enough to follow and rich enough in character to reward repeat attendance. For regulars it’s a pleasure to see local actors tackle one of Shakespeare’s best-constructed comedies and discover small, inventive directorial choices that breathe new life into old words. And for anyone who loves a good theatrical prank, the gulling sequence is worth the price of admission alone.
As for Smith, his love and passion for the work is evident onstage in every line and nuance of these talented actors. “There is poetry in Shakespeare that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world, and there’s a reason people think of him as the greatest poet in the English language. He can say things with an economy that nobody else has. He can say things that nobody else has ever thought to say. And he can really worm his way into your heart.”
The Main Street Theatre is at 3235 N. Main Street in Prescott Valley, more at mstpv.org or call 928-515-2944.
