TWELFTH NIGHT

 As a modern woman dealing with Shakespeare, it often feels like one is being held to the demands of the past, having to adhere to a dominant male perspective. How do we get unstuck from the expectations of producing Shakespeare through shifting the sense of the space? How do we tell this story from The Female Gaze? How do we reach back in time and pull Shakespeare forward to modernity? If music be the food of love…can music transcend time? Ultimately, how do we honor Shakespeare’s intention, and bring the story away from grief and closer to joy?

In Viola, I see the contemporary shadings of our current time -- the examining and role-playing of the constructs of gender and sexuality as Viola does in her drag persona of “Cesario”. If we adhere to the identity of Viola as ”woman” then perhaps she can be explored as an avatar of modern women from today. This modernity makes both Viola and Sebastian characters out-of-time with the rest of the characters in the play, and so I have explored setting them literally out of sync with the past of Elizabethan England, people of today who through a storm becomes time travelers, outliers, whose very identities influence the outcomes of the story.