FREEPORT — “Disguise, I see, thou art a wickedness” says a character in the play “Twelfth Night,” currently running in Discovery Park at L.L. Bean. Yes, and it makes for wicked good fun in this second annual outdoor production by the Freeport Shakespeare Festival.

The character in question is Viola,a shipwrecked young woman who is forced to take on the guise of a man to start a new life in the land of Illyria.  Her story is one of several woven together to illustrate the often comic missteps and misapprehensions of those who look for love in what sometimes turn out to be very wrong places.

Director Dennis McLernon has assembled a fine cast made up about equally of local talent and visiting thespians and, as reviewed on a cool Friday night, they have committed to putting a great deal of energy into this roughly 400 year-old play.

Jordana DeZeeuw is good at getting at her Viola’s considerable pluck while essentially ad-libbing an opposite gender identity amid an array of overwrought and pompous nobles.  She physically and verbally presents that sense of being tossed about as other characters seek to woo or befriend the “him” she has become.

As a grieving woman who believes she has fallen for “him,” Tyler Layton gives her Olivia that sort of deliriousness that goes with infatuation while James Noel Hoban makes his Count Orsino appropriately full of himself while believing he is in love.

Paul D. Farwell, Charles Michael Howard, Julie George-Carlson, Matthew Power and Will Rhys have great fun with their roles.

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Farwell’s Feste, the fool, is perhaps the wisest man in the show as he toys with and comments upon the others.  He also gets to sing a few tunes both as entertainer and tone setter for the events of the play.

Howard and Power are hilarious as Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, drunken revelers who may be using each other but have a lot of fun in doing so, until perhaps the end.

Rhys, as Malvolio the steward with a fateful self-regard, gets to make some lengthy speeches in which silliness and half-baked romanticism intermix.

Though there may be just a little bit too much scurrying around at the beginning of each act, the great 18th-century costumes, good lighting and sound and multilevel set complete what is, in all the important ways, another winner in what should become a long tradition of summer Shakespeare productions in Freeport.

Steve Feeney is a freelance writer who lives in Portland.
  
 
  

 


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