Shine Darkly, Illyria

Reviewed by Neal Weaver
McCadden Place Theatre
Through May 29

This curious play, written by Meghan Brown, developed with Fugitive Kind Theatre, and incorporating input from director Amanda McRaven, is a freewheeling fantasia drawn from themes, characters, and situations in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. It’s also an apocalyptic dystopia, cast in the form of a sequel depicting events that occurred after the end of Shakespeare’s play.

Duke Orsino (Jason Vande Brake) has married Viola (Sage Howard Simpson), and Olivia (Mercedes Manning) has married Viola’s long-lost twin Sebastian (Jim Senti), but they are not destined to live happily ever after. Olivia is still mourning her dead brother, and Orsino seems interested only in playing his old phonograph records on an old-fashioned machine with a large flower-like horn. And unbeknownst to both husbands, Viola and Olivia are indulging in torrid phone sex. (In Illyria, they communicate via tin-can telephones.) The two women share a fantasy in which Viola re-assumes her identity as the boy Cesario, who is supposedly hugely endowed and throbbing to penetrate Olivia.

Meanwhile, the citizens of Illyria are total hedonists, determined only to enjoy themselves. None of them bear children because they don’t believe in the future. The presiding spirit is the Moon (Alana Marie Cheuvront), a scantily clad athletic pole dancer. She seems to be both the Island country’s governing force and its prophet.

Every night there are festivities presided over by Feste (Jeff Marras), the fleshily androgynous emcee, who takes orders from the Moon, delivered via the tin-can phone.  (The Moon at times seems to be the voice of reason and a force for good, but she’s also a drug-pusher, supplying Olivia and Sir Toby Belch (Benny Wills) with the local drug of choice, moon dust, which sounds suspiciously like cocaine.)

The evening’s entertainment always consists of the acting out, in shorthand form, of the story of Twelfth Night, after which the natives perform the moon dance, a strange ritual involving a lot of umbrellas. Now, however, the Moon is taking a different tack: she informs the populace that there will be no performance, and warns them that the island nation is sinking into the sea. There’ll soon be a terrible storm, followed by a tsunami, which will destroy Illyria. (In the immortal words of Anna Russell, “Mind you, spoken in her riff on Wagner’s Ring Cycle,  I’m not making this up!”)

The citizens, climate-change deniers all, simply laugh at her prophecy. Only Sebastian seems to take her seriously, and decides to try and raise his ship, which has sunk in the harbor. He’s jeered at for his efforts. Sir Toby turns rabble-rouser, becoming a Trump-like figure intent on debunking everything and everybody. He accuses the Moon of serving the interests only of the rich, like Countess Olivia and Duke Orsino. He spits on the Moon, causing her to go into a tailspin and disappear.

Everyone is temporarily sobered by the arrival of a terrible storm, but Olivia insists that the storm will pass and everything will go on as before. Sebastian sets to work rebuilding his ship, and Viola, uncertain whether she wants to be Cesario or Viola, has an identity crisis. Olivia realizes her real love is Cesario, and she’d married Sebastian only because he looked like the boy. Now she must shed her illusions and learn to face reality.

After an evening of pessimism and nihilism, Brown somehow contrives a happy ending in which the characters all, improbably, face the facts.  All this is mildly enjoyable for a while, what with its zany choreography by Jessica DiBattista and costumes by Allison Dillard, but it seems to go on forever, with more false endings than Cymbeline.

Brown has bitten off more than she can chew, combining far-fetched fantasy with an attempt to deal allegorically with current issues. The result is largely a muddle. But the actors are dedicated and make much of it interesting.

Fugitive Kind at McCadden Place Theatre, 1157 N. McCadden Place, Hollywood. Fri., 8 p.m., Sat., 4 & 8 p.m., Sun., 7 p.m., through May 29. (702) 204-6149 or https://www.artful.ly/fugitive-kind. Running time: One hour and 40 minutes with one intermission.