A terrible storm. A violent shipwreck. Many are drowned. As the storm abates, Viola, a daughter of noble birth, is washed ashore. Inside her, a personal storm still rages. Her brother, a twin, is missing. Probably, he is drowned. Everything dear to her has been lost in the storm, and until she has mourned that loss, she will lose herself inside another personality—another class and another gender, even. She will become Cesario, the Duke’s manservant.

Costume sketches for Twelfth Night by Kaye Voyce.

It would be fair to say, I think, that Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is generally thought of as a charming romantic comedy. As Matt D’Amico (playing Curio in Juilliard’s production this month) put it, people know this play as “a magical tale full of fun, farcical adventures.” We watch, knowingly, as Viola, disguised as a man, negotiates her way through the gender politics of love; the triangle completed by the Duke Orsino and the Countess Olivia. As an added joy, the subplot treats us to the antics of a trio of drunken fools, Toby Belch, Andrew Aguecheek, and Fabian: their pseudo-philosophical arguments, their late-night choruses, and the cowardice of Andrew in his duel with Cesario. When they join forces with Olivia’s gentlewoman, Maria, and play an enormous prank on the puritanical Malvolio, it is generally considered glorious fun.

You can imagine the surprise, then, of fourth-year actors (Group 31), when, at our first rehearsal, we were invited by director Daniel Fish to take this all much, much, much more seriously. Mr. Fish, whose production of True Love recently reached the end of its highly successful run downtown at the Zipper Theatre, introduced us to his very personal reading of Twelfth Night. His desire was that each of us invest very deeply in the pain at the heart of our characters’ farcical behavior. He pointed out that Viola’s decision to disguise herself as Cesario comes out of the devastation of losing everything she owns, and the even greater devastation of losing her twin brother. We were reminded that the play begins with a speech about the destructive nature of love.

O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou,
That notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, naught enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe’er,
But falls into abatement and low price
Even in a minute.

As a company, we slowly began to explore a much darker world than we had imagined. We began to see the tragedy in Orsino’s unrequited love for Olivia. Even with the knowledge of his own destruction that he expounds upon in this opening speech, he is powerless to stop loving Olivia.

O, when my eyes did see Olivia first,
Methought she purged the air of pestilence.
That instant was I turned into a hart,
And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,
E’er since pursue me.

Olivia herself is in a perpetual state of mourning for her brother’s recent death and has refused the company of men, therefore (we realized) denying the possibility of love in her life. It became clear that Olivia’s puritanical manservant Malvolio, in his desperate need for power, wanted to keep Olivia in this withdrawn state, so that he could rule over her household. We then looked at Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek, not as drunken fools, but tragically addicted alcoholics, running from their private pains. Their plot with Maria now became a small revolution, fought against Malvolio’s desire to drag them away from their partying and back into their pain.

When I talked to Wayne Scott, who plays Antonio in this production, he said, “Everything is complete heartache. Everyone’s broken-hearted, even the comedians.” Indeed, Antonio, whose deep love for Sebastian is thwarted by Sebastian’s need to mourn the loss of his twin sister, Viola, is one of the play’s most broken-hearted characters. Like Orsino, Antonio is aware of the destructive nature of his love, but powerless to stop it: “But come what may, I do adore thee so / That danger shall seem sport, and I will go!” and “I could not stay behind you. My desire / More sharp than filed steel, did spur me forth.”

This strange world, Illyria, where Viola washes ashore, is populated with people crippled by their heartache. It is as if Viola, paralyzed by the pain of losing her brother, has washed ashore on an island full of mirrors. She is confronted by person after person who, like her, is stuck in his own mourning. Until Viola begins to realize that her withdrawal into the guise of Cesario is only preventing her from healing (“Disguise I see thou art a wickedness / Wherein the pregnant enemy does much”)—until she sees that she is denying the possibility of love in her life by withdrawing from herself, and until she finally removes her disguise—the spell cannot be broken and Illyria remains crippled with sorrow.

Our scenic designer, Christine Jones, has worked with director Daniel Fish to create this Illyria, a country whose sorrow holds it in stasis. The physical space of the Drama Theater stage has been transformed into a psychological space; covered in gray industrial felt, it is a place devoid of the joy and possibility of color. It is a place of mourning. The only joy is offered by the bittersweet sight of a Christmas tree, still standing after the Christmas season has ended. A door, a rope, and a ladder all offer a false possibility of escape. None of these exits, in fact, lead out of this room. It is a room of the mind, a mental space.

Costume designer Kaye Voyce has individualized each character’s pain in their specific choices of clothing. Olivia is literally wrapped in mourning: her black dress wrapping around and around her, cocooning her. Andrew Aguecheek’s suit is falling apart, just as he is physically and mentally falling apart with his alcoholism; Sir Toby Belch is desperately holding onto the joy of the Christmas season that has already past, fighting off the depression of facing another year by wearing a particularly “Christmassy” outfit that has long since lost its luster.

I was reminded in my research, recently, that Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night immediately after Romeo and Juliet. I began to wonder why—after writing a play about the healing power of love, a play in which a single pair of lovers heal a feuding nation—Shakespeare would write a play that takes the destructive nature of love as its starting point. Letting my imagination run wild, I imagined Shakespeare losing the love that inspired Romeo and Juliet and falling into a devastating heartbreak. I began to imagine that Shakespeare needed to write Twelfth Night to work his way through his devastation—that Shakespeare was on the same personal journey as his character, Viola.

How fitting, then, that we, Group 31, finish our fourth-year preview season with this play! In a city still mourning the events of September 11, we are able to present our audiences with the story of a city that finds its way out of the paralyzing effects of devastation and loss.

Twelfth Night plays from February 6 through 10 in the Drama Theater, on the fourth floor of The Juilliard School. Performances are at 8 p.m. Monday to Saturday, with an additional performance at 2 p.m. on Saturday. Sunday’s show starts at 7 p.m.

Craig Baldwin is a fourth-year actor who writes regularly about drama for The Juilliard Journal. He plays the part of Andrew Aguecheek in Juilliard’s production of Twelfth Night.