Opening the AQ season with “Twelfth Night”

For the first Aquinas College production of the 24-25 year, I set my college students the challenge of a Shakespeare play. Classical work is not a fundamental part of our mission as an issues-based program, but I wanted students to get some basic experience working with Shakespeare’s text. I have always been intrigued by the fact that Twelfth Night is a postwar play. These are people who have been at war and have been marked by that experience in some way. What if the revelry, the scheming, the romance, and even the cruelty are byproducts of these people learning how to live together again after a period of conflict. We therefore took design inspiration from near the site of the original Illyria, and set the play visually and aurally just after the Balkan wars of the 1990s.