Pig Iron’s ‘Twelfth Night’ (2nd review)

I reviewed Pig Iron’s Twelfth Night when it debuted at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre in the 2011 Live Arts Festival. I liked it then, and unlike BSR’s Gary L. Day, I like it now that it’s getting a re-mount at FringeArts. (To read Day’s review, click here. To read my 2011 review, click here.)

Day complains that the show’s ladies are unmemorable and that the onstage musicians had no business trying to act. To my eye, under Dan Rothenberg’s direction, the players add marvelous musical as well as physical texture to the action, particularly in the captivating maelstrom of hilarious debauchery that marks the wedding of Sir Toby Belch to Maria. And Charleigh E. Parker, reprising the 2011 role of Maria, far from being forgettable, masters every moment from the tortured side-eye she gives Malvolio in his early scenes to her reverberating glee when he falls prey to her pranks.

As Malvolio, Chris Thorn (replacing Michael Sean McGuinness of the 2011 cast) takes a rather modest approach when the insufferably ambitious steward to the lady Olivia (the returning Birgit Huppuch) first appears. But that just means he’s got plenty of room to build as things unfold.

Thorn succeeds with that despicable yet piteous brew of well-deserved humiliation that flavors all the best Malvolios. The starchy steward’s mental and physical mortification and his vow of revenge (which Thorn plays tearfully instead of angrily) can add a dark cast to an otherwise thin and frothy plot. But watching this Twelfth Night made me nostalgic for a time when a prank was aimed at a single— and perhaps even deserving— target.

Airline hoax

Pig Iron’s revival opened about a week after the latest Internet prank went viral over Thanksgiving. Legions of bored Millennials glued to Twitter over the holiday discovered the live-tweeted saga of a reality TV producer who boarded a plane with a jeans-clad mom dripping with noisy entitlement. Tweet by tweet, the producer shared his personal campaign of terror to put the woman in her place, including a photo of a sexually threatening note he passed to her on a paper coaster. When the harpy in question got off the plane, she punched him in the face.

Legions of airline and Internet-savvy sleuths soon figured out that the whole story was a clever charade cooked up to fool us all into cheering the puerile TV producer on in his own misogynistic fantasy made public.

At least Maria and Sir Toby Belch (here, a perpetually-inebriated James Sugg, returning to the role he created in 2011) have a legitimate bone to pick with Malvolio, who fantasizes out loud about bedding his noble employer and then lording it over the rest of the household. When everyone else is just trying to have a good time, Malvolio is the all-around wet blanket of the century. But Internet dwellers, as drunk as Sir Toby on their own anonymity and limitless reach, are out to fool us all as viciously and as easily as Maria persuades Malvolio into donning cross-gartered yellow stockings.

Jaws at the Golden Gate

Internet pranks range from pretty funny to really dastardly, and they go back at least to 2001, when somebody Photoshopped the image of a leaping, jaws-agape Great White Shark into a picture of a man dangling from a helicopter’s ladder under the Golden Gate Bridge. The fake hit half the in-boxes in the country with the claim that it was captured by National Geographic.

That one was pretty harmless, as far as public pranks go (except for shark-phobes in San Francisco, who may have been scarred for life). Others are a little more sinister, like the annual crop of celebrity death hoaxes. These false rumors naturally upset diehard fans of Jim Carrey, Tom Hanks, Morgan Freeman and Natalie Portman, not to mention the actors themselves.

“I’ve had my loved ones calling crying to check and see if I’m alive,” Carrie star Chloë Grace Moretz tweeted after news of her alleged snowboarding death in the Alps metastasized in September. “Don’t make this up. It’s not real. I am fully alive and here. You’re sick.”

Save this rabbit

Internet pranksters seem especially gleeful about targeting fans of Justin Bieber, presumably on the theory that devotees of that tattooed, pet-monkey-abandoning, harem-pants-wearing young crooner richly deserve their distress. Last fall, when a Photoshopped image of a bald Justin Bieber hit Twitter along with a claim that the pop star was dying of cancer, hundreds of teen girls were apparently incited to shave their own heads in sympathy.

And of course there are the racketeers who set up websites describing their plans to kill and eat a suitably adorable pet rabbit unless animal-rights activists donate a certain sum of money. The masterminds behind a rabbit-sacrifice ploy known as SaveToby.com claim they received as much as $20,000 from distraught bunny-lovers before the PayPal link was disabled.

Then there was the time last April when somebody hijacked the Twitter account of the Associated Press and sent the Dow into a brief 140-point dive with the false report that President Obama had been injured in an explosion at the White House.

Fool me once…

Maybe you could argue we’ve been living with this kind of ill-founded hysteria since the original Orson Welles 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds, but the weekly barrage of poisonous Internet hoaxes makes me enjoy Shakespeare’s classic character-driven prank all the more, even if I never got over feeling sorry for Malvolio. Or maybe I just don’t like it when I’m the one getting fooled, like that time I shared a fake photo of a shark swimming in a flooded street on my beloved Brigantine Island after Hurricane Sandy.

Perhaps our culture of wild, anonymous Internet pranks will catch up with us some day. As Malvolio says, “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.” We’ll never know what form his retribution will take. The same can be said for today’s Internet pranksters and their victims.

To read another review by Gary L. Day, click here.