New York’s Delacorte in Central Park reopens after renovation with a refurbished Twelfth Night production featuring a star-studded cast including Lupita Nyong'o as Viola alongside her brother Junior, Peter Dinklage, Sandra Oh, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Moses Sumney, and Khris Davis as Orsino. The production incorporates snippets of Swahili, reflecting the Nyong'o siblings’ and director Saheem Ali’s Nairobi roots. The plot follows Viola’s shipwreck, disguise as Cesario, entangled loves among Viola, Orsino, and Olivia, and a comic subplot where Sir Toby and Andrew trick Malvolio. The staging is abbreviated under two hours with no intermission.
The Delacorte, an open-air amphitheater in Central Park, paused its annual outdoor series of high-profile and free summer shows in 2024 to continue with a renovation, and now returns, refurbished and temporarily restocked with a bunch of familiar faces. For their production of William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, the Public Theater has snagged Peter Dinklage, Sandra Oh, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Daphne Rubin-Vega, singer/actor Moses Sumney, and Lupita Nyong'o in the central role of Viola, opposite her real-life brother Junior as Viola's twin Sebastian.
The Nyong'o siblings and director Saheem Ali all grew up in Nairobi, Kenya, and there are snatches of Swahili dialogue from Viola and Sebastian, separated via shipwreck as the play opens. Viola washes ashore on the coast of Illyria, afraid that Sebastian may be dead. She disguises herself as a man called Cesario and takes a job serving Duke Orsino (Khris Davis), who uses Cesario to send messages to Olivia (Oh), who he loves.
Olivia also figures into a comic subplot, where Sir Toby (John Ellison Conlee) and his sidekick Andrew (Ferguson), hedonists both, play a vengeful trick on Malvolio (Dinklage) for spoiling their fun. They convince Malvolio that Olivia loves him, sending him on a mission to seduce her, which prompts her to think him mad. Sebastian turns up, too, though his role is secondary.
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