By Matt Wolf
22 Jun 2009

At the same time, this cast will not be delivering up a musical per se, even if the collective lung power of the company might suggest otherwise; the symphonic folk-rock band Hem will be on hand to supply the musical soundscape for the show. Regarding Esparza, says Sullivan, who worked with the actor two seasons ago on Broadway in Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, "I thought Raśl's obsessiveness was right for the role. I wanted to get away from a sort of languorous Orsino to someone extremely high energy and changeable." The task suited Esparza fine. "I've been in New York nine years and always wanted to do [the Delacorte]; the opportunity never quite presented itself."

How, then, does he feel about the first Shakespeare he has undertaken professionally since a supporting role some years back in a Chicago Richard II? "It's hard work, and that's how you get better," says Esparza, who speaks with pride of reading the entirety of Macbeth when he was in fifth grade. "I like the idea of doing something I'm not exactly perfect for," he says of a role that is pushing him as Pinter and Mamet (Speed-the-Plow) in recent seasons have. "I think Orsino has no real sense of what love actually is, though he certainly know how to express it." One thing Esparza does know of the lovesick Illyrian duke should give comfort to this actor's fans: "I do think he needs to be very sexy."

McDonald, in turn, has a burgeoning TV career on the "Grey's Anatomy" spinoff, "Private Practice," and reports feeling a real tug to New York and the city's theatre now that she is spending so much time in Los Angeles. "It's just kismet, this play," says McDonald, who had been thinking how best to spend her summer hiatus from the TV show. "TV dialogue is one thing, but I thought, 'What about if I work on the greatest writer that ever lived,' and so I was thinking that and was at the first preview of Hair and Oskar Eustis came up to me." You can guess the rest of a story she recounts giddily, capping the narrative with an exultant, "So here I am!"

Such enthusiasms beg the question what kind of Twelfth Night will this be, given a play that Sullivan compares to "trying to grab a fish underwater. It's hard to get hold of; it avoids easy categorization." McDonald talks in images of regeneration and renewal. "It's like spring is what happens to Olivia; it's the end of winter and Cesario comes into her life and buds just shoot forth." Esparza expresses his ongoing surprise at "how unevenly happy the play feels," as befits a play that can move in an instant from farce to anger and humiliation, heartache to ecstatic release.

"I don't think this is going to be an incredibly whimsical version," says Eustis, "nor do I think it's going to be an entirely tragic version. There's a dark side to the play with Malvolio's punishment but there's also the power of love and a joy that are very real." Twelfth Night is aptly subtitled What You Will. Go with an open mind and a ready heart and let Shakespeare and these performers lead you, shall we say, where they will.

Matt Wolf is a New Yorker who has lived for 25 years in London, where he is theater critic of The International Herald Tribune.