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Shipwrecked romantics get washed ashore in Seattle Shakespeare Company’s sparkling comedy Twelfth Night directed by Jon Kretzu at the Center Theatre at Seattle Center. Rehearsals for the play started on Tuesday, September 23rd.
“The play for me is so much about all the different parts of love,” said Kretzu to the crowd gathered in the rehearsal room at Seattle Children’s Theatre. “All the things that love does to us. Not just the jolly parts, but all the really painful stuff that it brings up. And loneliness. Illyria just seemed like this incredible, fantastical place where people had to face their own feelings and deal with their own emotions and their own essential loneliness.” Kretzu and his design team have created a lush, elegant, and murky world of willows and shipwrecked furniture where the light of day is always at dusk and the characters are all grasping for something or someone to keep them from drowning in their own emotions.
Kretzu returns to Seattle Shakespeare Company having previously directed the 2013 production of Love’s Labour’s Lost. He is the former Associate Artistic Director of Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland.
Several of the cast members from Kretzu’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost return for Twelfth Night including Allie Pratt as Viola and Jay Myers as Orsino, as well as Mike Dooly (Sir Toby), David Quicksall (Malvolio), and George Mount (Sir Andrew). Elinor Gunn who recently played Cordelia in King Lear will play Olivia. Conner Neddersen and Christopher Morson, seen this past summer as Valentine and Speed in the Wooden O production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona will play Feste and Sebastian. Julie Briskman who played Jenny in The Threepenny Opera in 2011 will play Maria. This is the fifth time Seattle Shakespeare Company has produced Twelfth Night in the company’s 24 year history