Theater: Star Time in Central Park

TWELFTH NIGHT by William Shakespeare

The surest way to persuade a movie or TV star to appear onstage for minimal pay is to offer a juicy part in Shakespeare: the prestige seems to be all but irresistible. That stratagem has worked time and again for producer Joseph Papp for the 33 summers that he has staged free shows in New York City’s Central Park. Rarely if ever has it reaped him a richer harvest of celebrities than in the Twelfth Night that opened this week.

Michelle Pfeiffer, an Oscar nominee this year for Dangerous Liaisons, makes her stage debut as the grieving countess Olivia. Jeff Goldblum (The Fly) is her pettish steward Malvolio, John Amos (Roots) her drunken uncle Sir Toby Belch and Gregory Hines (The Cotton Club) Toby’s companion in ribaldry, the jester Feste. Stephen Collins (Tattinger’s) is the duke who desires Olivia, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (The Color of Money) the girl-masquerading-as- a -pageboy sent to plead his case. Among other screen and stage stalwarts rounding out the troupe is Charlaine Woodard (Ain’t Misbehavin’) as the merrily scheming maid Maria.

The risk in relying on an all-star cast is that it rarely melds into a stylistically consistent ensemble. Big-name actors tend to resist direction or, if willing to cooperate, prove unable: they lack stage training and technique for the classics or succumb to the heebie-jeebies of stage fright. Director Harold Guskin, a noted acting coach, has coaxed his players into charm and clarity in telling myriad tales of mistaken identity, most of which turn on the interchangeability of gender. Mastrantonio lacks the requisite androgyny but is otherwise faultless. Woodard, one of four black leads chosen in admirably color-blind casting, excels at seductive banter, and Andre Braugher is thrillingly intense as a pirate who risks his life to help a shipwrecked princeling. Hines serves mostly as a vaudevillian onlooker whose antics are a reminder that he is the premier tap dancer of our day.

But Guskin either had no larger vision of the play or could not express it. The performances clash in tone and degenerate into monologues and star turns, all but devoid of emotional connection save in the first tender flirtation between Pfeiffer and the disguised Mastrantonio. By far the worst offender is Goldblum, who seemingly has no clue about his character. In a blatant pitch for cheap laughs, he relies on grimaces and gestures from The Fly, topping them off with a pantomime of catching and eating some insect. At best the show skitters along the surface of a script rich in unexplored depths. If A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the most perfectly plotted comedy in the English language, Twelfth Night may be the most profound: its main subjects are death, madness, the delights of cruelty, the self-deluding and dreamlike quality of sexual attraction, the randomness of justice. Guskin’s troupe makes the play merely sprightly, an ingratiating but seemingly minor work.