Stage Review - Twelfth Night (Rainy Day Artists Collective)
Stage Review - Twelfth Night
Presented By: Rainy Day Artists Collective - Seattle, WA
Show Run: August 18 - August 24, 2025
Date Reviewed: Sunday, August 17, 2025 (Invited Dress/Preview)
Run Time: 2 Hours, 40 Minutes (inclusive of a 15-minute intermission)
Reviewed By: Anna Tatelman
In recent years, Twelfth Night has become one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays to reproduce or adapt, as regular theatre goers around the Puget Sound will likely know. I would guess this is because it’s one of Shakespeare’s funnier romantic comedies, bursting with mistaken or swapped identities, drunken antics, and an entertaining love quadrangle that eventually (mostly) resolves with a happy ending. Although this play is frequently produced, Rainy Day Artistic Collective’s current run of Twelfth Night jubilantly shows that theatre companies can still find exciting, fresh takes on this centuries-old material. Through smart casting choices, bold staging, and a few slight textual adjustments, Rainy Day heightens the original text’s latent gestures to the spectrums of gender and sexuality, giving us new ways to view and empathize with these characters of old.
A quick primer on Twelfth Night’s plot: the play follows a set of twins, Viola and Sebastian, who are separated during a massive storm and believe each other to be drowned. Viola decides to dress as a man and call herself Cesario so she can become a servant to the Duke of Illyria. The Duke is in love with a wealthy countess named Olivia, so he sends Cesario on his behalf to woo Olivia. Unfortunately for the Duke, the countess falls in love with Cesario – feelings that Cesario, being in love with the Duke, cannot reciprocate. Meanwhile, Sebastian is on a long journey to Illyria with Antonio, a sea captain who rescued him and is now quite devoted to his friend. There’s also a subplot involving practical jokes that become increasingly cruel and sometimes cause Twelfth Night to be considered one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” meaning that it fits neatly among neither his other romantic-comedy plays or his tragedy scripts – more on that later.
One of the best aspects of Rainy Day Artistic Collective’s interpretation of Twelfth Night is their take on Viola/Cesario. In most renditions, Viola’s decision to present as a man is driven by practicalities: she thinks this the best way to blend into her new society and earn her keep. While that’s true in Rainy Day’s rendition too, we understand, more vitally, that Viola has never fully felt comfortable with their gender or how others perceive their gender. The choice to disguise themself as Cesario is one that, paradoxically, also allows them to be their more authentic self.
This makes the stakes of the love quadrangle between the Duke and Cesario far more intense: Cesario’s anxiety is no longer that the Duke doesn’t know Cesario is truly a woman who’s in love with him, but rather that the Duke might reject Cesario outright if the Duke understood the truth of who Cesario as a person with a rich and complex history. Ronan Pirkle as Cesario fantastically captures this internal tension, both in moments when we see how he must hold back from the Duke, and in the soliloquies or addresses to the audience when he tries to process truth he can’t yet verbalize to himself or us.
Another smart intensification of the original text’s queerness and sexuality is its handling of the Malvolio character and plotline. A key subplot in Twelfth Night revolves around the characters who live at Olivia’s court: Sir Toby Belch, her uncle; Sir Andrew Aguecheek, his friend; Feste, her jester; Marius (usually Maria), her servant; and Malvolio, another servant. Irritated by Malvolio’s arrogant behavior, Toby, Andrew, Feste, and Marius all conspire to make Malvolio believe that Olivia has fallen in love with him. The practical joke gets taken further and further, far past the point when most modern audiences find the treatment of Malvolio anywhere near humorous.
What’s clever about Rainy Day’s reimagining of Twelfth Night is that believing Olivia is in love with him gives Malvolio permission to be more uninhibited. Actor Avery Woodridge does a tremendous job transforming from a straight-backed, tight-lipped servant to someone who glides, skips, and performs lap dances about the stage. I sometimes have trouble finding any aspect of the Malvolio plotline funny, but at this production, I found myself delighted at Malvolio’s ability to let his true self free from any usual concerns about gender or class constraints. The reactions of Olivia’s other staff to Malvolio also help manage this problematic material, as two of them become sexually attracted to one another because of their shared cruelty toward Malvolio. What was comedic in Shakespeare’s time is not always funny in ours, and to have these servants vacillate between eating popcorn and jumping each other’s bones while tormenting Malvolio amplifies this tension. Sexual liberation can be joyous and beautiful, but it can also be mean and ugly, and it’s brave to explore both sides of that.
Although operating on few resources, Rainy Day pulls off some impressive production feats. The fight choreography in particular is action-packed and dynamic, conveying all the confusion of the various mistaken identities while still being comedic (fight director is J. Carter; fight captain is Lark Peterson). The costumes are also fun; standouts for me are Olivia’s little black dress that passes for both a mourning and seductive outfit, Sir Toby Belch’s various drunk-vacation looks, and Malvolio’s fishnet stockings. While I did feel that the number of set changes between scenes wasn’t necessary in communicating location and added extra time to the run, I was at an invited dress rehearsal, so I imagine these transitions will have gotten sharper with practice.
Although Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is produced a fair amount, Rainy Day Artistic Collective’s reimagining proves that this centuries-old play can still offer us fresh insights into both the era it was written in and our own time. Instead of shying away from the queer subtext found in the original, Rainy Day capitalizes on and broadens the text’s queer themes to boldly explore love, the gender spectrum, and both the beauty and (within the Malvolio plotline) horror that can arise from actions propelled by desire. Whether you love the original Shakespeare play, have mixed emotions about how the canonical script frequently reinforces rather than challenges heteronormativity, or have never seen Twelfth Night, this is a joyfully, smartly queered production worth seeing.
Twelfth Night, presented by Rainy Day Artistic Collective, closed on August 24, but for more information on the organization and about upcoming productions, visit https://www.facebook.com/rainydaycollective/.
Photo credit: Crow Delavan
