Darius De Haas (right) as he appeared in previews of Twelfth Night at Westport Country Playhouse. Mark Lamos' production of the Shakespeare comedy plays on through Nov. 5. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.
For Darius De Haas the Westpoort Country Playhouse production of Twelfth Night is “my first public Shakespeare. I studied Shakespeare in school, but this is my first professional production.” The theater’s not far ahead of him. While director Mark Lamos is renowned for his Shakespeares—in New York, at numerous regional theaters and especially at his old Hartford Stage stomping grounds—this is only the third time in its 80 year history that the Westport Country Playhouse has done a Shakespeare play.
“From the first day, there was this great leveling in terms of everybody being part of one experience. We had to discuss the play, then break down the dialogue and meter, learning it as quickly as we could,” De Haas says.
When learning the role of Feste—a clown of unusual depth and gravity even for Shakespeare, right up there with the bard’s Fool in King’s Lear—De Haas says “I didn’t want to put a big conception of the character on it. I wanted to read it, get what the character was saying and doing. What’s he’s doing is heightened in terms of the other characters. I wanted to keep it basic, let the concept come as I became more comfortable.
Then it suddenly became uncomfortable, but not because of anything Shakespeare had written.
“At the curtain call, I hit my foot against a ramp onstage, that was buried in the sand.” De Haas injured his Achilles tendon. After a fraught few hours of wondering how to proceed, De Haas decided he would continue to perform the role, from a wheelchair. There was a frantic day of reblocking, which caused the cancellation of the final preview performance, but the show made its scheduled opening night, and the reviews have been encouraging. (Anita Gates in the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/nyregion/twelfth-night-at-the-westport-country-playhouse-review.html
called the show “very pretty, very funny and very lilting.” (My own review for the Fairfield County Weekly is here; previous NHTJ items on Twelfth Night are here, here, here and here.)
“Because it happened so quickly, on my part, I had no time to think about it,” De Haas says of his injury and its effect on the production. “There were many, many people they could bring in if they had to replace me, but that doesn’t mean it would have been easy. Mark [Lamos] has played Feste himself, years ago, though I don’t think he was looking forward to having to relearn the part under those conditions. For me, I was just, well, if can do it in a wheelchair… My thinking had to change so fast!”
Though he’d been prancing about the stage prior to the injury, having to keep Feste sedentary and wheelchair bound didn’t upend De Haas’ conception of the clown:
“I wanted to keep him rooted in humanity. I didn’t realize how difficult it was. He has a penchant for saying things which sound foolish but are really very deep. He’s telling Olivia ‘Get on your life. You’re young. You’re beautiful. It’s not going to last forever.’ I have relationships like that in real life.”
As for the popular question of whether the servant Malvolio deserves all the abuse and torture heaped on him, and whether Shakespeare might have provided a tad more motivation for Twelfth Night’s pranksters to humiliate the character, De Haas offers advice an acting teacher once gave him: “Don’t question it.”
Circumstances in the play—mistaken identities, sudden fallings in love , swordfights and shipwrecks—overwhelm the characters at every turn. Considering the chaos, Feste’s one of the cooler heads onstage.
“Sometimes he’s played as sad clown, on his last legs…” Suddenly De Haas bursts into laughter. “Hahaha! Forgive the pun!
In terms of mirthful mobility and emotional reach, helps that De Haas is an accomplished musical theater performer and concert vocalist. He doesn’t have to fly around the stage to command your attention. His voice can enchant you without any extra antic movement. He worked directly with the composer/sound designer John Gromada on Feste’s songs. “John was thankfully very familiar with my work, and fashioned the songs to me. I was free to suggest things. I’d done a recording of some Shakespearean sonnets, so this wasn’t entirely new for me.”
Despite the setback of an onstage injury, Darius De Haas is rolling on. “This is a release for the holidays.”