Starry Starry ‘Night’ | Newsweek – July 17, 1989
USA
Starry Starry ‘Night’
Hollywood’s finest brush up their Shakespeare, and the result is a fresh and magical evening
BY JACK KROLL
Can movie stars play Shakespeare onstage? Of course they can: Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Vanessa Redgrave . . . No, no, real movie stars: Michelle Pfeiffer, Jeff Goldblum, Gregory Hines, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Stephen Collins, people who star in real movies like “Married to the Mob,” “Scarface” and “Star Trek.” This question has added spice to Joseph Papp’s production of Twelfth Night, which opened last weekend at the Delacorte Theater in New York’s Central Park, starring those real luminaries and others including John Amos, Fisher Stevens and Charlaine Woodard. This is the 10th in Papp’s series of all 36 Shakespearean plays, which hasalready showcased such names as Christopher Reeve, Al Pacino and Joan Cusack. Papp has taken a good deal of heat from some critics who see his “Hollywood” casting as a vulgar attempt to enhance the box office at the expense of Shakespeare. But Papp rightly sees his “star” types as a pool of fresh talent that can bring new vitality to the perennial effort to create an “American” Shakespeare. And it turns out that this “Twelfth Night,” with the most box-officey cast yet, is one of the marathon’s most successful productions, delighting some 2,000 people a night-for free. Yes, those movie stars can play Shakespeare.
“The thing I’m most proud of is that we all made it fun,” says Michelle Pfeiffer. Fun is the sign under which Papp’s free summer Shakespeare in the Park productions have operated since 1956. For “Twelfth Night” director Harold Guskin, fun is the marriage of high spirits with high intelligence. “Twelfth Night” is Shakespeare’s greatest romantic comedy, and this production revels in the play’s richness and complexity, sweetness and tartness, luminosity and shadows.
Guskin, a noted acting coach whose students include Kevin Kline, Michael J. Fox and Glenn Close, directs with an inspired common sense. “Twelfth Night” is a play about who human beings are and who they love. Since these questions are tricky and hazardous, Guskin turns Shakespeare’s fairy-tale Illyria into a turn-of-the-century Monaco, complete with gambling casino (a crystalline design by John Lee Beatty I. In this playground the lifestyles of the rich and famous are totally screwed up. Duke Orsino (Collins) loves Countess Olivia (Pfeiffer). Olivia loves Orsino’s page Cesario, who’s really a young woman, Viola (Mastrantonio), disguised in men’s clothing. Viola loves Orsino. And Sebastian (Graham Winton), Viola’s twin brother, loves Olivia. Consider the possibilities!
Double focus:
Shakespeare does that, and the reverberations give the play an erotic uncertainty principie that makes all relationships ambiguous. The lovers, seeking both their true selves and their true partners, are caught in a double focus of comedy and pathos unequaled in Shakespeare. Director Guskin wanted this tragicomic effect even in the subplot of clowns, knaves and fools. Sir Toby Belch (John Amos) first appears not as the usual Falstaffian rumpot but stripped to the waist like a comic Mike Tyson. “The clowns are really dangerous,” says Guskin. “I didn’t cast them only for fun. That’s why I cast Amos. I told him I wanted danger.”
He got it: the shenanigans of Sir Toby, his malaprop buddy, Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Fisher Stevens), and Olivia’s house fool, Feste (Gregory Hines), have an element of cruelty that adds shading to the play’s romantic colors. This slapstick sadism reaches its peak in their tormenting of Olivia’s stuffed-shirt major-domo, Malvolio (Jeff Goldblum ). These actors bring a crazy, kinetic freshness to scenes that can be pretty ponderous. For Amos, a longtime success on TV ( he was Gordy the weatherman on the Mary Tyler Moore show), this is his first Shakespeare: “I had to get over a lot of hangups that American actors have, all the brainwashing about how only the English can really do it. Once I found out where the laughs were, I said, ‘Oh, I can do that‘.”
Goldblum, known for films like “The Big Chill” and “The Fly,” gives the farthest-out performance, his long arms flying as if inventing a sign language to express his impossible yearning for Olivia. Goldblum is his own best critic when he explains: “Malvolio has no outlet, no friends, everything he thinks is secret and enormous. It makes for a whole forest of hopes, fantasies, delusions.” Hines admits he was intimidated by the idea of doing Shakespeare. The great tap danger (“White Nights,” “The Cotton Club“) gives a knockout performance, singing, dancing, skewering everyone’s self-deceptions. “This is the first time I’ve ever worked in a real ensemble,” says Hines. He even credits the ensemble for the laugh he gets when he drops his pants and moons Malvolio: “It’s my behind, but it’s everyone’s reaction that makes it work.”
Erotic tension:
At the emotional center of “Twelfth Night” are the “love scenes” between Olivia and the male-disguised Viola. Michelle e Pfeiffer and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio play these scenes with a poignant sweetness and erotic tension. The play was complex enough in Shakespeare’s day, when boy actors played all the female roles, so you had a boy playing a woman in love with a man who’s really a woman played by a boy. Today there are even more overtones because of the breakout of gay sensibility into the cultural mainstream. Is Olivia in love with the man she thinks Viola to be? Or does she love the woman that Viola really is? Despite Shakespeare’s conventionally “happy” ending, the play insinuates a powerful questioning of the realities of identity, gender and desire. It’s doubtful that Viola and Olivia have ever been played by a more exquisite pair of actresses. Both are Oscar nominees, Pfeiffer this year for “Dangerous Liaisons,” Mastrantonio for the 1986 “The Color of Money.” Having a career year in movies with “Liaisons,” “Tequila Sunrise” and “Married to the Mob,” Pfeiffer showed courage in making her stage debut despite the misgivings of her advisers and her own fears. “Every day I said to myself, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ ” she says. “Here I finally got comfortable with my life and look what I’m diving into. I’m still terrified, but not as much. Every night is different, and Harold has made it a circus.”
Mastrantonio is an experienced stage actress who’s doing her third Shakespeare. “In film you’re learning about your character in bits and pieces,” she says. “In theater there’s that wonderful feeling when everything comes together. The horror is you have to do it in front of thousands of people. There are nights I think, ‘Can’t I just do this in the bathroom?’ ” But the stage has its unique rewards. When Stephen Collins left the theater one night a New York kid came up to him and said, “Gee, thanks. You made Shakespeare sound just like English.”
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