[In the following review of Brian Kulick's 2002 staging of Twelfth Night at the open-air Delacorte Theatre in New York City's Central Park, Brustein contends that Kulick and his star-studded cast barely explored the depths of character and theme offered by Shakespeare's text.]

The season being summer, it is time for Shakespeare, particularly Twelfth Night, which, along with As You Like It and A Midsummer Night's Dream, is a perennial favorite of outdoor festivals. In my time, I must have endured a hundred nights of Twelfth Night, one of them not that long ago in the very Delacorte Theater where the current version is being staged, the sole offering of the New York Shakespeare Festival's summer season. Like that previous production, which starred Michelle Pfeiffer and Jeff Goldblum, this one is a celebrity gathering featuring a number of movie and television luminaries. Some of these actors, notably those with stage experience, actually have some chops. Others should have been advised not to serve their theater apprenticeships in important Shakespearean roles.

They have not been helped much by their director, Brian Kulick, whose imaginative contribution seems to have been pretty much exhausted by the visual concept. Walt Spangler's attractive design, set against the green-carpeted, moon-drenched background of Central Park, is composed of a majestic blue fun-park scoop that occupies half the stage, on the rest of which sits a derelict wreck of a blue ship with a huge hole in its side. Through this opening can be glimpsed a bit of the cargo—notably a large nude odalisque—which suggests that Sebastian and Viola might have been engaged in smuggling paintings into the Florentine art market before being shipwrecked in Illyria. The blue ship serves as a prop for the court scenes. The scoop provides the occasion for most of the physical action, which consists mainly of characters sliding down the polished wooden surface on Persian carpets. This is fun for about ten minutes. After the eleventh or twelfth such prank (and virtually every member of the cast gets a shot at it), it begins to grow a trifle tedious.

This Twelfth Night is lovely to look at—Miguel Angel Huidor's colorful nineteenth-century costumes and Michael Chybowski's shimmering lighting are especially attractive. But it lacks a strong interpretive approach other than the way it finds double entendres (otherwise known as Shakespeare's bawdry) in much of the language. Is Kulick trying to prove Viola's belief that “they that dally nicely with words may quickly make them wanton”? To be sure, Twelfth Night has many such verbal allusions, the broadest being the way Malvolio unconsciously spells out a rude word for Olivia's private parts. And it may be that Shakespeare's adolescent weakness for sexual puns is especially riotous in Twelfth Night (like Feste, Shakespeare in his lighter moments is a “corrupter of words”).

But the play also enjoys a sensual understructure that is almost entirely ignored in this production. The lesbian implications of Olivia's attraction to a young woman disguised as a boy are hardly touched upon, largely because Julia Stiles's Viola fails to summon up more than a pinched smirk in response to Kathryn Meisle's insistent attentions. With her singsong delivery and immobile features, Stiles is the latest in a Central Park tradition of casting untrained movie stars in ingenue roles, and it does not help her already weak vocal projection that the airlines seem to have timed their shuttles over Manhattan to muffle her speeches. Stiles and the considerably more mature Meisle often seem to be in different plays—or, more accurately, different media.

Similarly, although Antonio's passion for Sebastian (Zach Braff) gets some emphasis with the help of a subtle performance by Sterling Brown, the impact of Viola's gender confusion on Orsino's sense of male pride is barely explored. This is not to say that Jimmy Smits's Orsino lacks manliness—he comes off as a very dashing romantic swashbuckler in his red dressing gown and hussar uniform. But once Orsino has established his infatuation with music, the director leaves him nowhere to go. Nor has the composer (Duncan Sheik) provided much in the way of lyrical support. The songs are of indifferent quality, and they are indifferently sung by Michael Potts as Feste.

Where the production finds some strength is in its comic scenes. Oliver Platt as a Dickensian Sir Toby and Michael Stuhlbarg as a spindly Sir Andrew generally form a strong team, looting the beached ship and squirting wineskins at each other. And Christopher Lloyd's Malvolio, a shiny-domed menace out of The Island of Dr. Moreau, is a good foil for their foolery. But considering Lloyd's genius for manic farce, it is puzzling that he seems too restrained here and fails to capture some of the pain and rejection that lies beneath the pompous self-satisfaction of an egregious ass.

By the time this Twelfth Night ends, it seems to be well into its thirteenth night. The production has long since exhausted our goodwill and patience. The recognition scene, in which Viola and Sebastian take about ten minutes to acknowledge that they are brother and sister—surely this is what Ionesco was satirizing in The Bald Soprano, where a long-married husband and wife have a hard time recognizing each other despite mountains of evidence—seems even more interminable than the one in Cymbeline. We are no longer interested in which Jack gets which Jill, because we've never believed in any of the relationships. There was more sense of the play, and more playful sensuality, in the concluding scene of John Madden's Shakespeare in Love—in which Gwyneth Paltrow, her wet smock clinging to her delicate body, walked from the sea to alight upon the beach of Illyria—than in this entire plodding three-hour evening.