By Coral Gables Gazette staff
The University of Miami Department of Theatre Arts opens its spring season with a production of William Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” bringing one of the Bard’s most beloved comedies to the stage at the Jerry Herman Ring Theatre on the Coral Gables campus. Performances run Friday, Feb. 27 through March 5.
A comedy built on chaos and mistaken identity
Written around 1601, “Twelfth Night” takes its name from the twelfth night after Christmas — a time historically associated with festivity, role reversal, and organized disorder. The play delivers on that premise at every turn. Twins Viola and Sebastian wash ashore after a shipwreck, each convinced the other has drowned. Viola disguises herself as a male page named Cesario and enters the service of Duke Orsino, who is hopelessly in love with the Countess Olivia. Orsino sends Viola to woo Olivia on his behalf. Olivia falls instead for the messenger. The entanglements multiply from there.
Woven through the central love triangle is a parallel plot of comic mischief. Malvolio, Olivia’s pompous steward, becomes the target of an elaborate prank engineered by Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Maria. A forged letter convinces him that Olivia is secretly in love with him, sending him into a spiral of preening self-delusion that Shakespeare mines for some of the play’s sharpest comedy. The two plots collide and finally resolve when Sebastian’s arrival untangles the web of mistaken identities.
The play has endured for more than four centuries because it operates on more than one register simultaneously. It is funny — at times raucously so — but it also turns on questions of desire, grief, and the instability of identity. Viola’s disguise is played for laughs, but it also generates the play’s emotional core: a character who cannot speak her own feelings while helping someone else articulate his.
A spring season with range
“Twelfth Night” opens a semester that reflects the department’s breadth. In March, the program moves to its new Black Box Theatre — which opened last year — for “New Box, New Musicals,” a series of five original shows written and developed by graduate students at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and performed by UM’s own musical theatre students. That collaboration runs March 25 through 28 and is directed by NDavid Williams, head of the BFA Comprehensive Musical Theatre program at UM. Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein” follows in April.
“Twelfth Night” offers a chance to see student performers tackle one of Shakespeare’s sharpest comic works in a professional-caliber venue.
The combination of a canonical Shakespeare comedy, a new-works showcase developed with a peer institution, and a beloved musical adaptation gives the spring season a shape that asks different things of student performers across its run. For audiences, it offers genuine variety within the span of a single semester.
If you go
What: “Twelfth Night” by William Shakespeare, presented by the University of Miami Department of Theatre Arts
When: Friday, Feb. 27, 8–10:30 p.m.; Saturday, Feb. 28, 2–4:30 p.m. Run continues through March 5.=
Where: Jerry Herman Theatre, 1312 Miller Drive, Coral Gables, FL 33146
Box office: 305-284-3355 | theatre@miami.edu
