Maria Giarrizzo-Bartz Photo.
Fluorescent blue light illuminated a pink dress, as eighth grader Willa Eno took the stage. As our heroine, Viola, she was the first thing the audience saw, with a paper in hand, ready to deliver the pre-show announcement. A pair of black pants stuck out from under her dress, foreshadowing the persona Viola would soon take on.
As she exited the stage and the music started, the audience let out the first applause of the night, ready to go on a theatrical journey.
This was the scene at Neighborhood Music School last Friday night, as Shaina Taub’s 2018 musical adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night took the stage at ATLAS Middle School, at 100 Audubon St. Now in its seventh year, the company showed just as much commitment and zeal as it always has, pouring copious amounts of heart and soul into the spring musical. This year’s performance was double cast, owing to ATLAS’ 21 actors.
“The themes of identity and empathy in Twelfth Night continue to resonate today,” said Maria Bartz, ATLAS teacher and co-founder. “Shaina Taub’s musical adaptation makes it even more accessible and exciting for our company and audiences to experience. By drawing design inspiration from 1960’s New Orleans, we were also able to connect our curriculum to studies of movements in the ‘60s including civil rights, LGBTQIA+, and second-wave feminism.”
The Academic Theatre Lab on Audubon Street, or ATLAS, is a small, theater-based private middle school located at Neighborhood Music School (NMS). The program’s leaders include Caroline Golschnieder and Bartz, as well as Theatrical Director Kendall Driffin, Music Director Abby Page, and Choreographer Briana Louis.
Set in the fictional kingdom of Illyria, Twelfth Night follows Viola (Willa Eno and Lia Gersick-Seward), who has been separated at sea from her brother Sebastian after a shipwreck (Zhi Rossini-Nogelo and Simon Stanek) and thinks that he has tragically passed away. Moving forward even through her grief, she becomes “Cesario,” a gentlemanly aide to Orsino (Maya Nakhimovsky and Flynn Rogers, lovingly dubbed "Sergeant Pickle” by the students, due to his green costume), not knowing that her brother is actually on his way to Illyria and very much alive.
As he arrives in Illyria, unbeknownst to her, she gets tangled up in a love triangle—or rather a love square—with Orsino, Sebastian, and the Countess Olivia (Aliya Carr and Barbara Pina). Mistaken identities, chaotic missed connections, and some true Shakespearian misunderstandings ensue.
The musical adaptation, conceived by Taub and Kwame Kwei-Armah for the Public Theater roughly a decade ago, introduces jazz music and a traditional musical structure to the beloved Shakespearian classic. At ATLAS, students have designed a set around 1960's New Orleans, a conscious choice made to bring the jazzy music of the show into the set, costumes, and lighting.
“A lot of the music is really jazzy, and New Orleans is the birthplace of jazz,” said Jonah Gionfriddo, an 8th grader playing the jester Feste in the Friday night cast, and an Illyrian on Saturday.
As the complicated web of character relations began to unfurl Friday, we in the audience met townspeople, a charming fool, a group of friends with swords, and a right hand man to the countess among the people in Illyria. This included a winning performance by Gionfriddo as Feste, who delivered comedic lines with freshness and finesse, played piano with passion, and simultaneously sang the musical highlight “Is This Not Love?," the soundtrack of Viola’s unrequited love for Orsino.
In addition to the live piano, Gionfriddo also composed instrumental transition music for the scene changes throughout the show. The music fit seamlessly into the soundtrack and contributed to the jazzy atmosphere of the production.
As we in the audience watched Viola love, lie, and learn, Eno delivered an earnest and gentle performance, her soft jazzy vocals bringing out the pure emotion in her voice, dropping subtle hints to her beloved.
“My father had a daughter who loved a man” she sang, her pining palpable as the oblivious Orsino yearned for Olivia.
Around the actors, who brought the show to life, much of the Illyrian scenery was devised by the company. At ATLAS, students and teachers dedicate a few class periods each week to “STEM Stagecraft,” or building the world of their production with the fundamentals of science, technology, engineering and math.
Each student belongs to a STEM department (there’s set, props, lighting and sound, costumes, or graphics), and works for the entire semester to execute their vision of the task they are assigned. This semester, those creations featured a bright and colorful cityscape background adorned with various pride flags, polka-dotted costume pieces, and painted cardboard swords.
The company's hard work was tangible, even though it took “tears, broken needles, and a lot of stress”, according to Pina, who Saturday played Countess Olivia.
It’s just one of the ways ATLAS’ curriculum ties into its current production each semester. Over the past few months, students also learned about everything 1960s, from the cold war to the civil rights movement to LGBTQIA+ activism.
“Twelfth Night has themes of self-expression and identity, and our company also found connections to queerness and the LGBTQIA+ community, which is under attack, and we wanted to show that that’s not okay,” said Gersick-Seaward, the Saturday cast’s Viola, during a post-production talk-back.
As opening night of Twelfth Night came to a close, members of the eighth grade class looked around—to each other, and to their seventh grade classmates—quietly acknowledging that this would be a final production for some of them. As the company sang its closing number, “Eyes of Another,” members reminded the audience not only of the love the characters contain on stage, but of the bonds students have built with each other in this dramatic community on Audubon Street.
“If we'd open our hearts to each other's beat, what a better world it could be,” the young actors sang before they gave their bows, ready to do it all over again the next day, for the last time.
Olivia Tapia Ko is a graduate of the Arts Council's Youth Arts Journalism Initiative and a sophomore at New Haven Academy.