Impact Theatre's Twelfth Night Waaaaay Off-Target

Cheshire Isaacs

If you're not familiar with Shakespeare's original, you'll have absolutely no clue what's going on.

I'm a big fan of Berkeley's Impact Theatre. The company stages high-energy productions in a little cave below La Val's Pizza on Euclid; if their shows often lack polish, they usually make up for it with plenty of gusto. But boy howdy -- when they're off the mark, they're off the mark.

Impact's new production of Twelfth Night starts with a clever concept that goes exactly nowhere. Director Melissa Hillman sets Shakespeare's comedy in the seaside kingdom of Hollywood, with all of the characters connected to something called "Illyria Studios." Orsino (Seth Thygesen) is a self-absorbed heartthrob, Olivia (Ara Glenn-Johanson) is the starlet he wants to woo, and the rest of the characters are more or less underlings who mill about the soundstage.

That would all be fine, except Hillman pursues the concept so half-heartedly that it never makes any particular amount of sense.

The most serious result is that if you're not familiar with Shakespeare's original, you'll have absolutely no clue what's going on -- the beautifully engineered plot no longer hangs together. That's partly due to the fact that Hillman cuts so much of the text that she ends up emphasizing the minor characters over the major ones. I wouldn't blame first-timers if they emerged from this production with the impression that the play is as much about Toby Belch (Valerie Weak) and Andrew Aguecheek (Jai Sahai) as it is about Viola (Maria Giere).

Hillman includes a lot of pop-culture references -- Feste (Cindy Im) even performs karaoke, including a rendition of Heart's "Alone" that's nearly worth the price of admission -- but these additions feel more like distractions than anything else. What's lost is the humor that's already in the text. Case in point: this is the first production I've ever seen in which the gulling of Malvolio (Jordan Winer) elicits no more than a few scattered laughs from the audience.

Sahai reads his lines like a stoner and Weak reads hers like a drunk, which is really funny for the first half-hour or so. But only Glenn-Johanson (pictured above) handles the language as if she actually understands what it means.

Again, I love Impact. But in Twelfth Night, the company's boisterous approach feels mighty labored -- a case in which both actors and audience end up missing the joke.