Connecting the Dots between Reading and Acting Twelfth Night

by Alexa Bashford (Circle 6)

Twelfth Night is a comedy written by William Shakespeare in 1601-1602 for the close of the Christmas season. You’d think having acted in an abridged production of Twelfth Night and already knowing the general storyline would make a blog post for this class easier to write. I would say that it doesn’t simply because I am so incredibly tempted to spoil the rest of the story for those of you who are only reading it for the first time. Instead, I’ll try and focus on my experiences acting it out and comparing them to the “just” reading it now, four years after I appeared in the production.

As I read through the first two acts, I couldn’t help but be reminded of how me and my fellow cast members acted the play out. As we had more females than males, we chose to reverse the genders of all the characters we featured in our production, but they still kept their original character’s personality. This made the plot of our Twelfth Night production even more intriguing. As a result, I often wonder what Shakespeare would have thought about our production. Thus, Olivia became Orsino, and Orsino became Olivia. In my case, I played two characters that were merged together, Valentine and Curio, who was simply known as Valentina.

As we were putting on this production of Shakespeare in the style of Mean Girls, we set the plot at a high school and it was decided that we were to recite our lines with Valley Girl accents. It took forever for all of us cast members to stop giggling during rehearsals while trying to learn our lines. I mean, who couldn’t giggle while listening to Orsino/Olivia’s speech “If music be the food of love, play on…” at the very beginning of Act One performed with the accent of a California airhead?

I have to say it was interesting to be a part of a production where I was able to play a Plastics-esque character while reciting Shakespeare. I chose to model my performance after the character Karen Smith in Mean Girls, as an obedient but ditzy servant to the truly popular girl Olivia at Illyria High School. For my character, I sometimes would just randomly trail off in the middle of a line to play up the fact that my character was a dumb subservient. In our production, the phrase “That’s so fetch” from Mean Girls evolved into “That’s so Feste”, an offstage joke meant to pun on none of our characters really liking Feste.

It’s both a weird and fascinating experience now simply reading through the whole of Twelfth Night as compared to when I was in my local production of it. I hadn’t read the whole thing before I was in that production; I was only knowledgeable about the scenes featured in our production. This class is my first time reading Twelfth Night as a whole. Though we kept many of the important scenes intact in our production, it’s weird to now suddenly be able to fill in the blanks between scenes I never knew existed before. Like nonexistent memories suddenly being remembered or something.

Though it’s odd to suddenly make connections where none existed before for me in my experience of reading Twelfth Night, I look forward to reading the rest of it and getting the complete story once and for all.

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8 thoughts on “Connecting the Dots between Reading and Acting Twelfth Night

  1. Timothy S

    It was interesting reading how your school overcame the production hurdles of limited actors, switching genders, and adapting the plot while having fun at the same time. I just hope that the lines of the play spoken in a valley girl accent were comprehensible to the audience!

    “Though we kept many of the important scenes intact in our production, it’s weird to now suddenly be able to fill in the blanks between scenes I never knew existed before. Like nonexistent memories suddenly being remembered or something.”

    I like how you state this. I wonder if the fact that the scenes that were new to you also seemed familiar is a credit to Shakespeare’s concise plotting and characterization. Were we exposed to an adaptation of Shakespeare’s work where there are a few omissions from the source, we wouldn’t miss as much compared to some other writers since his characters are so strong and their personalities resonate through all of their appearances.

    Suppose if there was an adaptation where we don’t see the scene where Feste dresses up as Sir Topas. If a character in the play mentioned “Feste tricked Malvolio into thinking he was a priest,” we can have a pretty strong idea on how his trickery would play out if we didn’t see it — all because we know Feste so well at this point.

    I think this strong plotting and characterization is another reason why his plays are so adaptable. We can imagine so many of these characters in a current context because we know their personalities so well. Hence we are able to have movies like She’s The Man be able to work successfully.

  2. Erin McGuinness

    I have to say, the whole Mean Girls approach to Twelfth Night sounds even funnier than the original play. I can picture Olivia as Regina George, and maybe a Gretchen Weiner approach to Maria, which would make Maria an even more hilariously maniacal and scheming character than she already is. That three-way call scene is reminiscent of the scene in the play that we watched in class where Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and Maria plot their revenge on the prideful fool Malvolio. Aaron would have to be Orsino and Cady could be Viola, although, Cady is more openly duplicitous, whereas Viola becomes Cesario, and except for her mentioning to Orsino that a different woman might feel about him the way he feels about Olivia, Viola doesn’t make an appearance after she takes on her role as Cesario. Your production sounds really interesting and I’m glad you posted about it!

  3. Lauren

    Alexa,

    Okay, I would have loved to see this play acted out in such a modern and relevant way! Your production sounds like a terribly funny rendition that would appeal to an even larger audience than She’s The Man given the more accurate depiction of the high school hierarchy.

    Also, the role reversal (i.e., Orsino becoming Olivia) rings true to the nature of acting in Shakespeare’s time. Your cast, I’m assuming, was primarily female, and so your director embraced this quality and used it to authenticate the application of gender role reversal in the play. I love when production companies take the liberty of adapting Shakespeare to better mirror the social and gender issues plaguing our present society.

    Also, “that’s so Feste”?- absolutely brilliant.

    – Lauren

  4. Andrea Stowell

    Alexa,

    Isn’t it ironic how you had too many female actresses and were in need of more males? To be honest, I have never enjoyed watching plays, but I think I would have liked this one based on its modern twist. After reading that you were in need of male actors I initially thought you were going to say the females played male roles while the males played female roles…that would have been confusing. It was a silly idea and I am much more interested in the reverse roles you acted out.
    Now that you have mentioned becoming aware of what comes in-between the scenes I am curious to what exactly that is. What “non-existent memories” are you talking about? I would have loved to hear your thoughts about this.

  5. Christine Fahnestock

    Okay, I wasn’t going to comment on yours because I had previously commented on it in our blog group, buuuut you’re lacking responses!
    I’ll try to not repeat things. Save for the fact that “That’s so Feste!” is still really funny, and I hope I can remember that a few years from now and laugh / nerd out about it.

    I’ve been thinking about your post, and our many discussions of it before class, and I think the most ironic, but also fascinating thing that you accomplished in that adaptation/production was the role reversal! Sort of taking modernism to the next level, y’know? Males would play the female parts back in Shakespeares time, and now females are there having big leads as well as playing the males parts at times, and it’s extremely great to think about how far we’ve progressed as a society, even if it’s something simple as the cast in a play.

    In the other comment I made on this post, I talked about the parallel between “She’s the Man” and your play adaption; while I still have yet to watch the movie, I’m almost certain that the traditional roles of male/female parts were kept the same (save for Amanda Bynes, of course), so that’s something to note too–that you took a much more modern and progressive way of choosing cast members than even “She’s the Man” had. While, it may have been due to the lack of male actors, it was nevertheless a really progressive and modern choice to make.

  6. Ryan

    One of the things that I have always loved about Shakespeare plays are all the different kinds of interpretations that are possible to play on. And the fact that there are limited stage directions make it so the actors can basically change the movements onstage to whatever they would like. As we saw, you could even change the plot to a girl trying out for the soccer team in college. The possibilities are pretty endless and I think the way your production ran sounds like a fantastic take on the show. Call it an alternate reality if you will—I would have loved to see the deception and disguise of a Regina George counterpart to a Twelfth Night character.

  7. Allison

    Alexa,

    Like Ryan said in the comment above me, I always think modern renditions of Shakespeare are really interesting. It’s cool that the themes and situations Shakespeare was writing transcend hundreds and hundreds of years. I wonder what a modern version of Shakespeare’s plays were like fifty years ago, and what they’ll be like fifty years in the future. Putting on Twelfth Night in the style of Mean Girls must’ve made it really fun for you and your castmates! Twelfth Night was a romantic comedy of its own time, so transforming it into something along the lines of Mean Girls or She’s the Man makes a lot of sense.

  8. Janet

    Alexa,

    It’s interesting that your group chose to put on this play in such a modernized version (even down to the Valley girl accents–I, too, would have loved to see that). Do you think that, in some ways, the fact that you were able to translate Shakespeare’s scenes into high school life is a testament to the timelessness of not only love, but also of classism and scorn? Most people who read this play, I think, focus on deception and gender roles and other important issues as they relate to love, but think just as important is the issue of hierarchical irony and social climbing.

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