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The Drilling Company’s free Shakespeare in the Parking Lot summer series is going strong in its 29th year. The scrappy company’s latest Lower East Side locale is a school parking lot, at a corner that’s rather noisy and raucous on a Saturday night. But what’s Twelfth Night if not rambunctious?
Their latest production has the company’s wonted urban energy and good-natured elasticity. In-the-round staging has characters emerging from four different corners – five if you count the parked SUV that, it turns out, doesn’t just happen to be there. Pacing is measured but efficient, with snappy action and lots of laughs. Director Hamilton Clancy, who also plays a lean, mischievous Toby Belch, conjures ways to make the twisted and frankly preposterous plot intelligible, while with their solid mastery of Shakespearean prose style the actors make their nutty characters almost believable.
Standouts among the sturdy performances include Mary Lineham’s exaggeratedly naturalistic Viola and the extraordinary Emanuel Elpenord’s cartoonishly riotous Malvolio. Andy Rowell dazzles as the fool Feste, who becomes, next to Viola, the play’s most endearing figure. Lizabeth Allen is subtly hilarious as Sir Andrew Aguecheek, while John Patrick Hart as Orsino exudes the cocky hunkiness of a ’70s movie star.
Ivory Aquino’s Olivia, weirdly stiff at first, explodes into garish passion when she falls for the disguised Viola. Guido Gatmaytan as Sebastian employs overacting perfectly calibrated for this cockeyed story of mistaken identity.
The hoary tales of cross-dressing and sexual ambiguity Shakespeare absorbed into this absurd comedy can take on more prominent meaning in our era of trans liberation and the infantile right-wing backlash against it. This Drilling Company production doesn’t address this outright, but it doesn’t have to. Twelfth Night is in this and other ways a play for the ages, including ours. Colorful productions like this one, freshly imagined while respectful to the source, prove it.
Twelfth Night continues Thursdays through Saturdays until August 3. Tickets are free. Details online.
