INTERVIEW: Frog & Peach heads to Ilyria
Photo: Alyssa Diamond and Jonathan Reed Wexler star in Frog & Peach Theatre Company’s production of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Photo courtesy of Maria Baranova / Provided by Glenn Freedman PR with permission.
The Frog & Peach Theater Company has tackled many William Shakespeare plays over its 22-year history, with a particular focus on the Bard’s comedies. After mounting a successful revival of A Midsummer Night’s Dream last season, the creative team of the off-Broadway company set their sights on Twelfth Night, one of the most beloved plays in the Shakespeare repertoire.
Frog & Peach’s production is currently running through March 17 at the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture in New York City. The company’s co-founder and artistic director, Lynnea Benson, directs the play, which follows the romantic shenanigans of a cast of characters in the seaside kingdom of Ilyria.
“We just have a wonderful comic ensemble, and based on feedback from audiences at our relatively new venue downtown, that’s what they want to see,” Benson said in a recent phone interview. “So we thought, well, we did A Midsummer Night’s Dream last season to tremendous response, and Twelfth Night is one of those plays that you really can only do if you get the right group of people assembled and ready to go.”
Benson and the creative team thought they had just the right mixture of talent in the room. Kevin Hauver is playing Sir Toby, and Alyssa Diamond is playing Viola. They are joined by 14 other talented actors.
“It’s a 16-person cast, and I would have trouble imagining moving forward if any of them had not been available,” Benson said. “In my experience, a tragedy such as Macbeth, which is what we did for our debut at the Sheen Center, is pretty straightforward. I mean, let’s face it, tragedy is pretty easy, but comedy is something else. You can count on all kinds of things going haywire with a comedy, but for Twelfth Night, I’ll tell you, it’s been a total lovefest. And I go home from rehearsals feeling very satisfied and smug with myself.”
This staging of Twelfth Night brings together a contemporary look with a touch of period costumes. Benson’s decision, with the help of set and costume designer Asa Benally, mimics how Shakespeare’s plays were originally produced in London.
“Style-wise we do contemporary clothing to some extent with heavy touches of period, which is just like Shakespeare did — you know, the nicest stuff you had and a touch of the period, which audiences pick up on right away,” she said. “However, for Twelfth Night, it’s sort of a fanciful play. Ilyria, where the play takes place, is sort of a fantastical place where people come to find out their real selves, so I’ve been working with our wonderful designer, Asa Benally, who is just a genius in creating a witty, believable place. There is certainly outlandish and comic elements, but it’s very accessible. And I think very accessible especially to modern audiences, especially for those who never tried Shakespeare, who may think Shakespeare is not for them.”
The laughs in Twelfth Night are frequent, and the actors were able to figure out the comic parts in the rehearsal room. As Benson put it, Shakespeare sometimes dabbles in the lowest of low comedy, so the Frog & Peach team has had to find their inner 12-year-old.
Benson began the Frog & Peach Theatre Company in 1997 with fellow actors from The Actors Studio. There was a hunger and desire to present the Bard’s words to American audiences, an idea that met with some resistance 22 years ago.
“My husband and I were both big Shakespeare fans,” Benson said. “When we met we found that although we came from completely different parts of the country we each brought the same books to New York with us, and that was The Collected Works of Shakespeare, The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe and The Collected Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. We both loved Shakespeare, and we saw a lot of productions, some of which we really weren’t pleased with. Meanwhile a lot of our peers even at The Actors Studio were shy of Shakespeare. They thought, oh, Americans can’t do Shakespeare. It’s too hard. American audiences don’t want to see Shakespeare, and we felt that Shakespeare was especially for the 99 percent.”
She added: “And we took some sessions with the wonderful Patrick Tucker, who is a First Folio expert and just a wonderful, wonderful teacher all around, and he sort of confirmed what we thought: Americans were especially suited for Shakespeare. … So we’ve got one of the most diverse audiences to be found anywhere, and I think that reflects the real nature of New Yorkers and their intellectual curiosity and their desire for fun entertainment that doesn’t condescend to them.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Frog & Peach Theatre Company presents Twelfth Night through March 17 at the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
