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Sunday, September 4, 2011

Review : Pig Iron's 'Twelfth Night'

By Toby Zinman

  Pig Iron Theatre Co, — the crown princes of the radical avant-garde -- goes mainstream: This year it’s Shakespeare, the comfy Suzanne Roberts Theatre, the works. Which is not to say their Twelfth Night is not a wild rumpus of a show, full of wailing gypsy music (by Rosie Langabeer) played by an (overused) band, and stuffed with terrific performances.

  Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night  is about twins, gender-confusion, and love — passionate, crazy, I’ll-die-if-I-don’t-have-you love.  Pig Iron’s Twelfth Night is also about all that stuff, but gives the drunks, the cruel noblemen, and the rude servants much more stage time.

  One of the many casting triumphs is that Sarah Sanford (splendid as Viola  disguised as a boy) and Blake DeLong (playing her long-lost twin brother Sebastian) look ridiculously alike. Another is Dito van Reigersberg’s Duke Orsino is hilariously elegant.

  But the surprise is Scott Greer as Feste the Fool. It is a brilliant and subtle and funny performance, and never have I heard the delicate “Hey Ho the Wind and the Rain” sung more movingly.

 The messy set (designed by Maiko Matsushima) makes great use of a skateboard ramp as characters use it to zoom in and out. Dan Rothenberg directs with his usual bizarre élan.

$15-30.  7 p.m. 9/7 and 8, and 9/13-15; 6 p.m 9/9 and 16; 2 and 8 p.m. 9/10 and 17; 1 and 7 p.m. 9/11. Suzanne Roberts Theatre, Broad and Lombard Streets.
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About Philly Stage
Howard Shapiro reviews and writes about theater for The Inquirer, and has been on staff since 1970. He's had many posts at the newspaper, including cultural arts editor and editor of the Weekend section. He's twice been the editor of the Travel section, for which he writes frequently. He began writing theater criticism a decade ago, and has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, an Internews fellow in Greece, and a fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts' Journalism Institutue in Theater and Musical Theater, where Robert Brustein was among his mentors. He teaches arts criticism and travel writing at Temple University, and is Broadway critic for the NPR-affliated stations of the Classical Network.


Toby Zinman's night job since 2006 is theater critic for the Inquirer. She also is a contributing writer for Variety and American Theatre magazine. Her day job: Prize-winning prof at UArts, author of four books about four playwrights (Rabe, McNally, Miller, Albee), and doer of scholarly deeds (winner of five NEH grants, Fulbright lecturer at Tel Aviv University, visiting professor in China). Her 'weekend' job as a travel writer provides adventure: dogsledding in the Yukon, ziplining in Belize, walking coast-to-coast across England, and cowboying in the Australian Outback.


Wendy Rosenfield has been writing freelance features and theater reviews for The Inquirer since 2006. She was theater critic for the Philadelphia Weekly from 1995 to 2001, after which she enjoyed a five-year baby-raising sabbatical. She also writes the ArtsJournal blog Drama Queen. She was 2009 and 2010 Guest Critic for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Region II National Critics Institute, a 2008 NEA Fellow in Theater and Musical Theater, and a participant in the Bennington Writer's Workshop. A graduate of Bennington College, she is inching toward a Master's degree in Liberal Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. She also is a fiction writer, was proofreader to a swami, publications editor for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and a Brownie Girl Scout troop leader.

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