<i>Twelfth Night</i> , by William Shakespeare, directed by Saheem Ali

The Delacorte Theater, home to Shakespeare in the Park, closed at the end of the 2023 season to undergo an almost two-year renovation. New Yorkers were eager to see the remodel and return to a cherished summer theater tradition. Since 1962, the Delacorte has staged at least one and often two or three Shakespeare plays every summer, out in the open, free to the public, in the heart of Central Park. Joseph Papp, the founder of the Public Theater in New York, believed that extraordinary theater should be accessible to all. James Earl Jones, Raul Julia, Sam Waterston, Ruby Dee, William Hurt, Meryl Streep, Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, and Natalie Portman, among many other iconic thespians of the past fifty-plus years, have graced its stage. Tickets have always been free, and the methods to secure them have changed little over time. The classic method to secure tickets has always been to arrive at the Delacorte around dawn and wait in line until noon in the hope of securing seats. The Public Theater has tried to make the experience more inclusive (What person with a nine-to-five job can take time off to secure tickets?) and the Public (as it’s endearingly known in New York) has recently branched out to offer tickets throughout the five boroughs at specific locations and also via an online lottery through a local smartphone ticket app. Still, one can only get tickets on the day of the performance, so it requires either a bit of chance or a huge time commitment to be sitting under the stars, watching Shakespeare, outside in the middle of Central Park on the great island of Manhattan.As such, it was a wondrous surprise to find out in late August that I had won the online lottery and secured two tickets to see the first Shakespeare production since the renovation of the Delacorte. This summer’s production was a star-studded Twelfth Night (the seventh time it has been staged since the opening of the Delacorte in 1962), and the weather looked like it would cooperate. Directed by Saheem Ali, the current associate artistic director of the Public Theater, Twelfth Night starred Lupita Nyong’o as the shipwrecked Viola and her brother, Junior Nyong’o, as Viola’s twin brother, Sebastian. Other prominent performers in this production included Sandra Oh as Countess Olivia; American singer-songwriter Moses Sumney as Feste, a servant and jester in Olivia’s circle; and Peter Dinklage as Malvolio, one of Olivia’s stewards.This staging of Twelfth Night was funny, witty, and political in its subtlety. With a minimalist set design, the play began with a small cadre of violinists serenading as the audience looked for their seats. Sumney’s glorious understated falsetto and undulating form soon emerged from a crescent of red words and letters—“what you will”—that formed the background of the stage throughout the almost two-hour performance and is also Shakespeare’s subtitle for the play. In the first scene, Lupita Nyong’o, as Viola, emerged from a hidden elevator platform riser beneath the stage. She was in a small modern rubber dinghy with the captain of the ship, wearing an orange life vest. Viola inquires as to what country they have landed on, clearly shaken that Sebastian must have certainly died in the shipwreck. Soon Viola will be scheming and, disguised as a man named Cesario, falling in love with Duke Orsino (Khris Davis), who himself is enamored with Countess Olivia (Oh).As I watched Nyong’o emerge on this small dinghy, I couldn’t help but wonder if the production was asking the audience to think about movement and migration of people—an indirect reference to the drastically cruel immigration policies of Donald Trump’s second administration. The dinghy itself reminded me of both the legions of refugees seeking shelter on European shores in the past many years and those who traversed borders and seas as they attempted to reach the United States, often without legal paperwork. Subtle, perhaps, but certainly something I wondered as the performance commenced. It soon became clear that Duke Orsino’s character would also indirectly speak to the political present. We met Orsino, fit and masculine, during one of his modern-day workouts, surrounded by a posse of male friends acting out tropes of traditional masculinity. This introduction made me reflect on the current complexities surrounding male podcast bros and the toxic masculinity that they can often perpetuate. On one hand, Viola is about to play the role of a man in order to sidle up to royalty; on the other, Orsino seems comforted by his cadre’s stereotypical maleness. What, I wondered, are these competing expressions of what it means to be “male” in the United States in 2025? To the Central Park audience, Davis’s Orsino and his comedic crew were hilarious, but I couldn’t help but find myself intrigued by what I read as the clever juxtaposition and questioning of modern-day patriarchy and male toxicity.As the play goes on, Sumney’s elegant voice found moments that transcended the story itself, lulling the Delacorte with his extraordinary vocal range and gentle delivery. Oh was magnificent and funny as Olivia, and Dinklage, as her loyal steward, did his best to navigate love interests and her whims, keeping the audience in a trance and agape in laughter. Jesse Tyler Ferguson as Andrew Aguecheek and John Ellison Conlee as Sir Toby Belch, Olivia’s uncle, did wonders as a comedic duo throughout the play, cracking jokes, plotting mischief, smoking pot, and doing lines of cocaine in a bathtub as a disheveled combo up to no good. There were plenty of subplots and slapstick comedy in this run of Twelfth Night, and these two characters were a highlight.Yet it was the emotional closing of the production that had the audience at the edge of their seats (and soon dancing). The tail end of the show spoke to me as another subtle critique of the current administration’s immigration policies. Toward the end of the play, it comes out that Cesario is in fact a woman. We find this out at about the same time that the two siblings (who have been styled the same throughout the play) realize that in fact they are both alive. These siblings (twins in the play; brother and sister in real life), who have survived a traumatic shipwreck and all the drama that has ensued, embrace, aware that their survival truly is a miracle. As Lupita Nyong’o and Junior Nyong’o stepped back from each other, awestruck, they addressed each other in Swahili across the stage. Very few would know what they said, what section from the Shakespeare play was conveyed, and if perhaps anything else was added or taken away during this moment. It was, for me, an extraordinary encounter and theater at its best. One could hear a pin drop in the newly renovated Delacorte, in a country which is in the midst of violently tearing apart families who have roots abroad. Here in Central Park, in a city of generational migration, in a country of immigrants, we were watching two characters from a far-off land, both from Shakespeare’s imagination and yet also in real life, two siblings reunited on stage, twin siblings who had survived. It wasn’t lost on me that Lupita Nyong’o was born in Mexico and raised in Kenya, perhaps another subtle element of critique in her magnificent casting. Of course, little did we know that less than four months later, New York City would vote in its first Muslim and African-born mayor.Although the Delacorte Theater has no curtain, the “curtain call” was playful, musical, and glorious. Sumney came back out to sing “When That I Was and a Little Tiny Boy,” which began gently and built into almost a house track, ecstatic and expressive and funky, and all the actors returned in drag sensibility. The energy was expressive and campy. Having started with a shipwreck, this ending, with lights and dancing and fluid expression of gender and joy, bookended a production that peppered subtlety throughout to question both where this country is going and where it is at. For two hours, watching stars under the stars, we were encouraged and admonished and questioned and asked and exclaimed at—“what you will”—and it is, for this country, for the world and for the audience at the Delacorte, it was and will be, what wewill.