or What You Will

I’ve always struggled with this play.  When I saw it before I was a Shakespeare nerd, I didn’t understand what was funny about torturing someone.  When I saw it later, I didn’t understand why anyone liked (let alone “loved”) each other.  Even later in life, I was cast in who I considered was the least likable person in the play, but a character others seemed to like.  Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t hate it or anything and I always had a fondness for Viola and Sir Andrew, but I’d just rather watch or work on As You Like It.  For some reason though this play has been chasing me around lately and I was encouraged a few times to direct it to which I said, “ehn”.

I finally gave in when David Stephens asked me to direct this play for Sunstone.  I’d been wanting to get back into directing in the community after over a decade of working in education (which I love) and I took it as a sign that I should do this play.  

Well as the good Doctor Thompson once said “anything worth doing is worth doing right” so I approached the play with fresh eyes.  What struck me was how much grief was in the text.  This is far from a new idea, but so much more than I originally considered.  It finally made sense to me why this play didn’t make sense to me.  I was always watching a rollicking comedy.  It’s not, there’s a lot of comedy here, but there’s a lot of weight here too.  There’s the grief of a lost love or family member of course, but there’s also the grief of unrequited love (or infatuation) and the grief of I-don’t-know-how-to-be-in-this-world.  Everyone in this play is experiencing grief.  I believe the story of this play is fighting through grief to joy.  That’s a play I can get behind.

Shakespeare sets the play in Illyria even though the source material is Italian.  Italian plays from that time were wacky and slapstick but often very surface as well and I believe Shakespeare wanted to go deeper so he set it in Illyria which, at the time, was just to the east of Italy.  I think he wanted to do an Italian adjacent play.  We as an ensemble took this idea and created the mantra “The love is real in Illyria”.  What if we gave the characters of this play the benefit of the doubt that their love and grief and heartache are sincere and not a patchwork for vanity and ego?

I wish we could just call this play “What You Will”.  In the play Olivia asks Malvolio to fend off Cesario by doing “what you will”.  I like to think that means, “do whatever you can do”.  

Do whatever you can do to fight through grief to joy and maybe you can find yourself in a place where the love is real.  What a beautiful idea for a play, who wouldn’t want to work on that? And what an absolute joy it’s been to work with this cast and crew to bring it alive for you.

If you’ll indulge a personal note:

Everything always for Stephanie.

and

This one’s for Mom and Dad.

Ave

Atque

Vale

With love and gratitude,

Jake Merriman