Twelfth Night

SPACED INVADER The Bricklayers blast the Bard into the atmosphere.

Say you want to produce a Shakespeare play but you’re worried it’ll put audiences to sleep. Once upon a time, the solution was either to cut out the boring bits or build the fanciest set imaginable. Since the middle of the last century, however, the standard response has been to relocate the play in time, space or both. It doesn’t have to make sense. Move Julius Caesar to Tony Soprano’s New Jersey. Set Much Ado about Nothing in Spanish Texas. Hell, put Hamlet in Disneyland.

The remarkable thing is that sometimes the play comes through anyway. In the Bricklayers’ Twelfth Night (coproduced with the French performance group Collectif Masque), Illyria is a dystopian foreign planet with a populace resembling Rocky Horror extras; Viola is an intergalactic traveler lost in space. Initially this concept seems gimmicky and unoriginal (Shakespeare in outer space is nothing new, as fans of both The Tempest and the 1956 sci-fi staple Forbidden Planet know), but ultimately codirectors Araoz and Trucano are less interested in distracting from the text than in probing it. This strange, benighted Illyria, with its slightly sadistic, sexually ambiguous inhabitants, proves a fitting spot for exploring the instability of identity in the play, not to mention the hint of cruelty in many of its jokes. That those jokes are funny nonetheless is a credit both to Shakespeare and to the production’s able coterie of commedia-style clowns, hilariously opposed by Trucano’s excellent Malvolio, a preening, seething mass of wounded dignity.