New York’s most famous venue for Shakespeare in the Park has returned, and with it the grand tradition of waking up at 4am and/or sleeping on the ground in order to score free tickets to star-studded theater. The Delacorte, an open-air amphitheater in Central Park, paused its annual outdoor series of high-profile and free summer shows in 2024 to continue with a renovation, and now returns, refurbished – and temporarily restocked with a bunch of familiar faces. For their production of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the Public Theater has snagged Peter Dinklage, Sandra Oh, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Daphne Rubin-Vega, singer/actor Moses Sumney, and Lupita Nyong’o in the central role of Viola, opposite her real-life brother Junior as Viola’s twin Sebastian.
The Nyong’o siblings and director Saheem Ali all grew up in Nairobi, Kenya, and there are snatches of Swahili dialogue from Viola and Sebastian, separated via shipwreck as the play opens. Viola washes ashore on the coast of Illyria, afraid that Sebastian may be dead. She disguises herself as a man called Cesario and takes a job serving Duke Orsino (Khris Davis), who uses Cesario to send messages to Olivia (Oh), who he loves. Olivia falls in love with Cesario/Viola, who falls in love with Orsino, who still pines for Olivia. Olivia also figures into a comic subplot, where Sir Toby (John Ellison Conlee) and his sidekick Andrew (Ferguson), hedonists both, play a vengeful trick on Malvolio (Dinklage) for spoiling their fun. They convince Malvolio that Olivia loves him, sending him on a mission to seduce her, which prompts her to think him mad. Sebastian turns up, too, though his role is secondary. This is a somewhat abbreviated production, cut down to under two hours, no intermission and not a lot of breathing room.
