Theatre AACC will put on the Shakespearean comedy “Twelfth Night” in November.
Madeline Austin, the play’s director, said the “screwball comedy” will be “a whole bunch of fun.”
“This play is hysterical,” Austin, a theater professor, said. “There’s a lot of slapstick comedy, and we have a wonderful stage choreographer. … It’s going to be such an integral part of this show.”
Theatre AACC tapped fight scene director Jonathan Rubin, who came to AACC last year for a stage combat workshop, to work as stage choreographer for “Twelfth Night.”
“Twelfth Night” is a classic Shakespearean play, following an aristocratic young woman who, after a shipwreck, disguises herself as a man and begins working as a servant in a duke’s household.
Theatre AACC’s performance, however, is set in 1930s Morocco.
“I visited Spain two years ago, and I saw Alhambra and the beautiful Moorish structure … and I thought that kind of era is fun with clothes and costumes,” Austin said. “I thought it lended itself very well to the play. I mean, ‘Twelfth Night’ has been done everywhere, you know, at every era. So this is just another one.”
Austin said acting in one of Shakespeare’s plays is a unique experience.
Actors “have to take Shakespeare’s language, his speech, his action, they have to take into account the type of language they’re speaking,” Austin said. “You need to see where Shakespeare put the hard stresses and the soft stresses, because he’s giving you clues. … He’s loaded his scripts with hidden directions.”
Andrew Agner-Nichols, a second-year non-degree student who will play Duke Orsino, said acting Shakespeare is “a whole different beast.”
“The anxiety of having to memorize everything, word for word, [because] you can’t really … come up with things ad lib, on the fly, with Shakespeare because of, you know, how it’s structured,” Agner-Nichols said. “That’s got me a little nervous, but, you know, it’s part of the job.”
Third-year transfer studies student Nathan Garcia, who will play Antonio in Theatre AACC’s production, said “Twelfth Night” is “a great play.”
Editor-in-Chief Jose Gonzalez contributed to this story.