Feste, Do Your Stuff!

Imagine this tableau with the guy on the right in a wheelchair. David Adkins, Nakeisha Daniel, Susan Kelechi Watson and Darius de Haas in Mark Lamos' production of Twelfth Night, through Nov. 5 at Westport Country Playhouse. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

So how’d that eleventh-hour crisis at Twelfth Night turn out? Darius De Haas, who’d been parading about the stage, and apparently into the audience as well, during the preview performances as Feste, injured his Achilles tendon Thursday night. (Yo, wrong Shakespeare play! Achilles is in Troilus and Cressida!)

De Haas was able to remain with the show, in which he also sings up a storm, but is now confined to a wheelchair. Director Mark Lamos and the cast spent all Friday reblocking the show around Feste’s sedentariness. Around 3:30 p.m., they realized they wouldn’t be ready in time for that night’s performance, so the 8 p.m. Friday show was cancelled. Saturday’s press night went on as scheduled, however. I saw the show Sunday afternoon and it was pretty, uh, surefooted. They’d even found De Haas a wheelchair to match the vaguely 1920s design style of Andrew Boyce’s set and Tilly Grimes’ costumes.

WCP’s Associate Artistic Director David Kennedy gave this pre-show announcement at the Sunday matinee: “Mr. De Haas asks that, on his first entrance, you take a good long look at his wheelchair… then forget about it.”

For many of his scenes, De Haas is pushed about the stage by this production’s Fabian, a character who doesn’t usually make an entrance until Act 1, Scene 5 and thus has nothing to say for his first few appearances here. That’s really the only clue that this was a hasty restaging.

There’ve been several fine Twelfth Nights on Connecticut stages in the past few decades. Mark Rucker’s Yale Rep one in 1995, (with then-students Tom McCarthy, Sanaa Lathan, Stephen DeRosa, Mercedes Herrero and Suzanne Cryer) and David Warren’s 2002 Long Wharf rendition (with David Garrison as Malvolio and Tom Beckett as Feste) both used 1960s Italian film imagery to infuse the play’s delirious Illyrian locale. Lamos opts for a jazz-age feel, as he did for his 1985 production of the play at Hartford Stage but less explicitly; at Hartford, there were obvious musical references to Cole Porter and Gershwin and more of a Prohibition-era party atmosphere. (Lamos’ Hartford cast included Jerome Kilty as Toby Belch and Mary Layne as Viola.) This one, which benefits from a multi-cultural cast, is bluesier, with a wild vamp to the line “Hold thy peace, you knave knight” ending in a suggestive pun.

I’m reviewing Twelfth Night for the Fairfield County Weekly. I’ll provide a link when that article’s published on Wednesday.