Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – All’s not well in Illyria: Axis Theatre puts on an elegantly truncated, unsettled TWELFTH NIGHT

• By drediman
• May 16, 2024
• No Comments

Cozily tucked in an intimate basement-level performance space in the West Village, you’ll find a terrific Off-Broadway theater company known as Axis Theatre Company, a scrappy institution which over the years has distinguished itself for mounting productions (largely revivals or stage adaptations of classics) marked by their clarity and unfussy theatricality — the trademark aesthetic of artistic director Randall Sharp. It’s hardly a surprise that her current production — an elegantly streamlined and truncated staging of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night — continues to bear these characteristics.

What’s fascinating about Sharp’s gently immersive interpretation, however, is the unsettled quality it more than occasionally takes on. This is not to say that this is an excessively grim take on the Bard’s oft-performed play — Sharp retains the playfulness and buoyancy most of us are familiar with, while largely avoiding to engage in the many opportunities for cartoonish, overly exaggerated shenanigans. Indeed, this is a Twelfth Night populated with grounded, emotionally accessible human beings. As such, audiences are given insight to character flaws — e.g., toxic masculinity, misogynistic behavior, socio-economic profiling, bulling — that most productions tend to gloss over. These observations are accented by a disorienting sound design, namely ominous creaking noises that pervade the play’s action, suggesting an unsavory underbelly to the play’s proceedings.

As always, Sharp’s staging is clean and stylish, putting the emphasis on the work’s subtly shifting emotional landscape. More than your typical production of the Shakespeare favorite, music takes on a noticeably central role. Live musicians are ingeniously incorporated into the fabric of the play, and they provide wonderful underscoring over the course of the performance (Paul Carbonara’s recurring love motif is particularly enchanting), nicely augmenting the aforementioned sound design (also by Carbonara). Overall, the acting is reliably solid — if nothing particularly eye-catching — which lends itself to Sharp’s human-scaled version of Twelfth Night.

RECOMMENDED

TWELFTH NIGHT
Off-Broadway, Play
Axis Theatre Company
1 hour, 30 minutes (without an intermission)
Through May 25