Shakespeare in the Park: Twelfth Night on PBS

At some point this year, and I don’t remember which corporate or governmental bullshit event it was, I subscribed to PBS and downloaded the PBS Passport app.

You can stream SO MUCH GOOD STUFF my gosh. Ballet! Antiques Roadshow! Stage performances from recent and distant history! The truly top-shelf visual dopamine of All Creatures Great and Small. I could end this post here and just say, PBS Passport is the greatest, and subscribing is an upgrade to your life.

Also – supporting a rural PBS station goes a VERY long way right now as the administration plays do-si-kiss-my-ass with funding.

BUT. Y’ALL.

Great Performances has begun streaming the 2025 Shakespeare in the Park production of Twelfth Night with a cast that includes, and I am not joking:

• Lupita Nyong’o
• Sandra Oh
• Peter Dinklage
• Junior Nyong’o, who is Lupita’s brother (the resemblance is profound)
• Jesse Tyler Ferguson
• Khris Davis
• Daphne Rubin-Vega

The performance was directed by Saheem Ali, and seriously, y’all. We watched the play over two nights, and it was easily one of the best productions I’ve seen.

And I don’t want to brag or anything, but I saw a production in the late 90s at Lincoln Center with Helen Hunt and Paul Rudd. You can watch it in varying degrees of quality on YouTube now.

• Not great audio and video quality but the full play (Shakespeare Network, YouTube)
• Twelfth Night, or What You Will, Part 1
• Twelfth Night, or What You Will, Part 2

That performance was also incredible, with music so alluring I bought the soundtrack on CD.

The Shakespeare in the Park production at the Delacorte equally blew my mind – and also had incredible music, much of it sung by Feste, played impeccably by Moses Sumney.

A behind the scenes clip of rehearsal

I’m not a theatre critic by a longshot, though I love live theater productions. I love remixes of Shakespeare that play with era or setting. And I love LOVE LOVE when clearly everyone involved is engaged with their character and the others on stage with an energy and ebullience that to me communicates that they’re really enjoying themselves. Antonio is played by an actor who goes by b. and they were mesmerizing; even with a smaller part and a few lines, their presence on stage had a gravity that was difficult to look away from.

I already watch tv with subtitles, but even with the text at the bottom of the screen, it was difficult to look away from most of this production. The only parts I found more dull were the scenes with Sir Toby Belch, played by John Ellison Conlee. While the other performers gave their delivery nuance and variety, Conlee mostly seemed to have one setting, which was “drunk bloviation.” Granted that’s Belch’s entire schtick, but those scenes were less engaging because of the sameness of the tone.

In addition to different kinds of love and ardor, Twelfth Night explores grief, identity, and gender; this production adds through a few changes an exploration of immigrant experience.

Viola and Sebastian are shipwrecked in Illyria, and some of their dialogue includes translations of the text into Swahili. They’ve washed ashore in a strange place where they are vulnerable, convinced they are now alone in this strange world, and their reunion and dialogue in Swahili at the end made my eyes tear because I didn’t understand it (no subtitles there) but also, I did understand it. I didn’t need to know the words to know the emotion of realizing a person thought dead is alive, and safe, and present and whole. Earlier that evening, I had been reading about the hundreds of people being kidnapped and disappeared by ICE in Charlotte, and clearly that added to my reaction.

The style and flair of the actors, such as dropping into modern speech rhythms for delivery of some lines and adding elements of camp and drag, was delightful. Peter Dinklage is incredible at physical comedy and his Malvolio is both brittle in his insecurities and weighty in his pompousness. There is nothing more funny to me right now than hearing him say “Cross gartered.”

This production lives in my mind alongside the production of Born With Teeth that was playing until recently in London, starring Edward Bluemel (My Lady Jane) and Ncuti Gatwa (Doctor Who). Born With Teeth is about an imagined alliance and rivalry (and mega flirtation) between William Shakespeare (Bluemel) and Christopher Marlowe (Gatwa). The palpable erotic tension was remarkable, but so too was the way in which Gatwa subtly included aspects of Black identity and history into how he interpreted Marlowe’s character. Similarly, Black identity and markers of Black culture – Orsino lifting weights while wearing a durag, elements of body posture and line delivery, for example – suffuse this production with layered meaning in a way that I can’t stop thinking about. I think I’m going to have to watch it again.

So, my recommendation: watch Twelfth Night on PBS Great Performances. It’s terrific. And it reminds me that I will be immeasurably more content if I engage with more theater, more marginalized actors interpreting historical figures and texts, and more PBS.