When the Countess Olivia's father and brother die, she enters into seven years of isolation and mourning, much to the dismay of Duke Orsino, who is head over heels (he thinks) in love with her. As if that wasn't enough matter for a May morning, her uncle, Sir Toby, is drunkenly carousing into the small hours every night with the dim-witted Sir Andrew. Even her shrewdly witty lady-in-waiting Maria can barely keep their debaucheries in check. But Maria's limits are also tested when the puritanical steward Malvolio enforces the mournful silence of the house with tyrannical exactitude.

Meanwhile the shipwrecked Viola has washed up on shore, alone and grieving her drowned brother. With nowhere to turn, she disguises herself as a man, calling herself Cesario, and entering into the Duke Orsino's service as a page, where, impressed by his intelligence and devotion, she promptly falls in love with him. Orsino, impressed by Cesario's intelligence and devotion, sends him off to be his love-ambassador to Olivia, where she, impressed by Cesario's intelligence and devotion, promptly falls in love with him. Viola nows finds herself trapped in a love triangle from hell, forced to do her duty and yet unable to confess her love.

While Olivia is distracted by Cesario's five-fold blazon, Maria resolves to punish Malvolio once and for all. With the help of Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and local rapscallion Fabian, who's really just here for the vibes, she tricks Malvolio into thinking that Olivia is desperately in love with her.

Into this ticking time-bomb blunders Sebastian, Viola's very much alive and not-drowned brother, with the notorious pirate Antonio in tow, himself desperately in love with Sebastian.

Did we mention Sebastian and Viola are identical twins? It's probably not important.

And what about the clown Feste who keeps turning up out of nowhere and seems to know more than she lets on? What's her deal?

The stage is set for a series of escalatingly silly events: chaotic love scenes, inept duels, and of course mistaken identities, all ultimately leading to healing and reconciliation.

We're finding inspo everywhere!

Some of the rawness and sweetness of the play's emotional life is found in the paintings of Marc Chagall: their strange, melancholy worlds of shadowy blues and mossy greens punctuated by blooms of aching red.

Aesthetically, we're feeling really inspired by the heightened theatrical world of clowning and foolery. As the Clown enigmatically reminds us: “Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.” The wisdom of the play lies in its combination of fairy-tale circumstances of shipwrecks and lost twins and mistaken identities, with the rawly human heartbreak and desire at its core. Gender, class, costume, emotion, desire -- all become masks or cloaks to hide the Self, the small, vulnerable, undiscovered thing at the heart of each of these extraordinary characters.

There's an element of street theatre in our production: folk art, puppetry, commedia...imagine a (really handsome) ragtag group of travelling players rolling into town with a huge old trunk endlessly full of strange props and costumes...or the survivors of a shipwreck staging a play on the beach with the flotsam and jetsam that washed up with them...or maybe something like Shakespeare's original Globe Theatre, where the imaginary division between audience and performer dissolves in the shared light of day, and whole worlds are conjured up with muscular Elizabethan roughness into the imagination purely from a flow of words.

We play with clarity, simplicity, honesty and joy.

Twelfth Night is equally as famous for its melancholic atmosphere of loss and grief as it is for it madcap antics, and I want to lean into this contrast even more by setting the play in a world just emerging from a terrible and violent war. How do you move on from grief and hatred? How do you take action when your whole life has fallen apart? Why do you stay still and hold onto your pain when the world rolls immutably forward? When your heart is broken how do you accept the open hand that life extends to you, offering a second chance at love, and the renewal of life and healing of grief? On both a personal and a universal scale, in the horrifying daily headlines or the infinite tiny heartbreaks of daily life, these questions resonate and reflect back to us the restless human need to keep searching for hope and life.

LET'S DO THIS!

This is where you come in to bring this production to life! Why should you give and what will your donation go to support?

• You're personally creating employment opportunities for independent artists at a time when public funding for the arts is becoming more and more scarce.

• You will be part of a community of people who have a direct impact on our artistic development and lay the groundwork for future productions.

• By deciding to invest in theatre, you are sending the message to those around you that gathering together to experience art communally is important.

• You will enjoy it! This is our final reason because it's the most important. Finding joy in a harsh world is literally the point of the play and by contributing to get to be part bringing that joy to light.
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WHERE YOUR DONATION GOES

If we surpass our goal we will be able to better compensate the artists involved in this production and invest into future productions.

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See you in Illyria!