Often referred to as the Hamlet of comedies, Twelfth Night is widely considered by scholars to be Shakespeare’s comedic masterpiece, a challenge the WHHS theater department is ready to take on in their first performance of the year.  

In the play, two twins, Viola and Sebastian, get separated in a foreign country after having been in a shipwreck. Viola dresses as a man to get a job with Duke Orsino and ends up falling in love with him. What follows is a complicated love triangle between Viola, Duke Orsino, and Countess Olivia, the woman Orsino is in love with. 

“It’s a comedy of mistaken identities, throwing out the idea of status in society,” Mike Sherman, the theater teacher and director of the play, said. “You have people falling for [other] people both above and below their social status, and I think it [also] really calls into question what gender roles are. What makes a man a man, and what makes a woman a woman?”

His role in Twelfth Night is to oversee the artistic vision of the play and ensure that the actors and designers work towards the same end production. Abbie Kershner, ‘26, the production stage manager of the show, plays a large part in this. 

“My main job as production stage manager is [I am] the hub of communication,” Kershner said. “If I do my job correctly, you never see me. And that’s kind of the point. Whenever there’s a deck change, a light change, a sound cue, I’m running it.” 

Twelfth Night will be Kershner’s first time managing an auditorium show, having previously stage managed in the much smaller Black Box theater. She is thrilled to be a part of this experience but has some concerns about the setting change.

“This is my eighth time [production stage managing], so I have done it a lot, but it is a little different when you’re in such a big space,” Kershner said. “It goes from the Black Box, which is really tiny and you can see everything really easily, to being really far away [from the stage in the auditorium] and I don’t really have control over everything.”

The theater department’s theme this year is strong female protagonists, and Twelfth Night is one of the few pieces of Shakespearean literature that meets this requirement, along with the plays Unsinkable Molly Brown and The Little Mermaid, which the department will perform in the upcoming year.  

“Viola comes more out of her shell as she is in the place of a man, but then eventually is able to feel her identity and be confident in that. She knows what she wants and she can speak up for that,”  Lauryn Shafer, ‘26, the actress who plays the role of Viola, said.  

She’s excited to have the opportunity to perform her first big lead role and is looking forward to mentoring younger kids in the world of theater.

“The juniors and SENIORS were always the people I looked up to when I was a freshman, so I’m excited to bring up the younger generation [in a similar way],” Shafer said.

Along with memorizing lines, the actors have to make sure they thoroughly understand the often confusing Shakespearean language. Many of them go through each line of Twelfth Night to grasp concepts that might not be so obvious at first.

“Whenever I direct Shakespeare, I work a lot with the actors to really make sure that what they’re doing is motivated and that they clearly know what they’re trying to say and why they’re trying to say it so that the audience does [too]. If the actor doesn’t know the answer to those questions, the audience doesn’t have a chance,” Sherman said.

By analyzing each line of the play so that they know what emotions to convey, the actors gain a deeper understanding of the play itself.

“[When Shakespeare is acted], it’s already interpreted, so you can understand where people are coming from and people’s motivations so much easier because it is displayed for you,” Kershner said. 

That same idea influenced the play’s producers to add another free, academic performance of Twelfth Night during school hours. The audience will be the Effies and E-flats, who will be reading Twelfth Night this year in their English classes. 

“Shakespeare is written to be performed. It’s one thing to read it and understand it in English class, and I think that’s great, but to see it performed is another way to experience it entirely,” Sherman said. 

Another challenge the cast has to face is the addition of a prologue to the original script. In the unedited script, the shipwreck scene that made Viola and Sebastian separate was not shown. The performers felt that this was a critical part of the audience’s understanding of Twelfth Night, and decided to pull a scene from The Tempest to incorporate into the beginning of the play. 

“It’s really new and there’s not something to go off of for this. It’s a scene from a tragedy put into a comedy, so it’s pretty tonally different, and it has big set pieces and a lot of tech in it,” Andrew Canter, ‘25, who plays Olivia’s uptight servant Malvolio, said. 

With his WHHS theater career coming to an end, Canter is excited to have a leadership role in his first Shakespearean play. He has made some key character choices to make sure that he embodies Malvolio in the best way possible. 

“I’ve been adjusting my posture. I always do a character walk when I play a character, so I’ve been walking upright, keeping my head up a little bit, and just trying to have a lot of tension when I talk in general because [Malvolio] is so stuck up,” Canter said.

In the end, all the cast and crew want the audience to follow along with the play and enjoy a moment away from their daily lives. 

“I hope that the audience is entertained,” Kershner said. “It’s a comedy. It does touch on love, and stuff like that a lot, but I think the overarching message of the show is that it’s really funny.”