In this production, we see on stage the mistreatment that is in other productions just described. Then your final line, so the delivery of that line, "I'd be revenged upon you all," to the audience, that's a really interesting choice. Can you talk a little bit about that? Sure. I think, with Tim and I, we did discuss it in the room a bit about opening up to implicate to get the people there. I don't know how kind that is really. No. But we as the audience become complicit. Yeah. In a way, but it is maybe another way to convey the levels that are there to then land it has it always is our job, and as Shakespeare always wanted us to, to land it over there in the audience. The experiences shouldn't be a discrete thing that I get to have. It's me conveying it for you to have either a catharsis or a problem. I think with a lot of the later plays, it's a problem. How about that? Why don't you wrestle with that? I don't know. I'm not entirely sure I can. That's great. Nor have I tried to tell you what it is, but there is something to be investigated. I was planning on asking you about your delivery of that line, but thought to ask it right then on the heels of this conversation about recognizing, it almost seems like Malvolio is defeated in that moment and recognizes, is their humility or shame in trying to rise above that? Is their structures that are in place? I feel like he doesn't have that self-knowledge yet, I don't know if that mortification has happened for him. To be honest, there's a part of it's that's how these things happen. Often, there are iterations of what we do on stage. There's the reality of literally you and your partner or your friends on stage, and then maybe the intention of the author that's being conveyed, and then also how it resonates with the audience among many levels that I've not talked about. But for me, it also lives in a place of I can't really look at them anymore. I don't know how, but I don't think he's not going to become Friar Laurence. I think it's going to go south, and I don't know how it's going to go south, but I think it's not going to go well. That's something to meditate on to. Well, like, "You've had this?" Yes. These people have behaved abominantly to you, and you have been misused horribly, but is there something in that mortification that could be edifying, that could liven your spirit, that could change and ripen you as a human being? Some characters in Shakespeare are able to take that experience, I think, and move with that, and be transformed by it, and some are not. That's part of his genius is that it doesn't make everything turn out okay like you said, and like we see. Many of the characters in this play do not have the happy ending that a comedy promises. Right. Truly. You can ask Robert this, are Toby and Maria can be happy? What is that marriage going to look like? Maybe they are, I don't know. Well, because what you're getting me to think about which is really interesting is just this idea that he, a character who really comes into the play honoring boundaries in a black and white thinker. This is right and this is wrong, then steps outside of those bounds because he's given a way out, but then what are the consequences of having done that? Well, and then of course, it just occurred to me again, there's obviously the allusion to puritanism in the play. I don't know that Malvolio, you can play him as a Puritan, which I think is interesting if he is. But to my mind, at my present understanding of him, it would be he was a Puritan because it was expedient based off, or needful to be so. But there's a reading, and the way that we're talking about it I feel like that's present there where this whole situation has solidified maybe his movement towards that. Then of course with the Puritans, you get the closing of the theaters, you get the clamping down of society, you get the revenge basically that doesn't end until Charles comes back in and the restoration happens. They get theirs, they come for everybody, and they get it. They get it for outsider. Yes. For how many years though? They got it for a while. That's a stark strange sad thing, I think, and that's one of those things, I think, Shakespeare's making fun of peevishness and of people who are so tight, and so want to shut down this crazy rollicking, unwieldy, sorrowful, happy thing that's happening, that want to contain it. I think part of the play is you can't. But then if you do have that thing at the end, and then the Puritans come in later. Well, I love that he's put a Puritan or a Puritan sympathizer in the play because especially in a play about identity, in a play about where these characters are shape-shifting and code-switching, and Twelfth Night being an allusion to the one day that all rules are off, because the perspective, as I understand of the Puritans is it's an abomination in the eyes of God to pretend to be anybody other than who God made you to be? Exactly. But Malvolio does that when given the [inaudible] But we see this over and again, don't we? When somebody ascribes to something and then falls like Icarus and maybe doesn't die, but then it's like, "No. That's not happening again on my watch." Now I'm going to shut it down for everybody else, or all the people that I can. That's great. Because maybe that's a direct. Malvolio could read this also, rather than what I was suggesting as a mortification of a ripening. He could view it as a justification for, "You got outside of the bounds. You left your connection with yourself and God, and the austereness of that, and look what happens. Let's go to work." "Those guys thou art of wickedness." Yes, there it is. Let's shut everything down here, and then let's go to the new world, and make fake continent hours where you're supposed to be an individual yourself. That comes the DNA of this country in some ways. One of the many things, but that's a whole other conversation.
