Troupe gives 'Twelfth Night' all the right shadings
CAMBRIDGE -- Festive and somber, playful and shadowy, the Actors' Shakespeare Project production of ''Twelfth Night" is a piquant holiday soufflé. It's light with laughter and fine silliness, but the delicately tuned ensemble also finds the darker reflections in Shakespeare's tale of hidden identities and misdirected loves.
Director Robert Walsh and his design crew let the lofty balconied space of the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center, skillfully lighted by Brendan Hearn, do most of the scene-setting work without any adornment. Amir Ofek's restrained costumes and Elizabeth Locke's delightful props -- especially the dressmaker's forms she provides for Feste to clown around with -- create a mostly timeless but vaguely Edwardian mood. Within this appropriately frothy but class-conscious world, the actors are free to let Shakespeare's lilting wit and classic slapstick work their magic.
And work it they do. Greg Steres's lovesick Orsino starts us off on just the right note: oblivious to his own ridiculousness, and all the funnier for it. Sarah Newhouse's Viola, meanwhile, at first seems a tad overwrought, but once she disguises herself as a man she finds the right proportions of sauciness and feeling. Her instant and overpowering love for Orsino, who hires her as a manservant to woo his beloved Olivia for him, is sweet and surprisingly persuasive.
Less so is Olivia's love for the disguised Viola, because Marya Lowry comes across as too exhaustingly hysterical and giddy to be sympathetic. And because she's older than you'd expect Olivia to be, there's also an embarrassing note of ridicule toward mature women in this casting. Yes, Olivia should seem a little silly, but she should never be pathetic.
Still, like the rest of the cast, Lowry shows her expertise in speaking Shakespeare's words, and the consistently high level of vocal work alone would be enough to make this ''Twelfth Night" worth seeing. But there's much more besides: a definitively feisty Maria from Bobbie Steinbach, who imbues this crafty maid with every imaginable shading of good humor and mischief; a fine pair of buffoons in Michael F. Walker's impeccably idiotic Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Michael Balcanoff's proto-Falstaffian Sir Toby Belch; an unusually but appropriately subdued John Kuntz as Viola's brother, Sebastian; and consistently excellent work from the troupe of young actors in minor roles.
And, most of all, there are the two fools: Feste, who knows he is one, and Malvolio, who doesn't. Kenny Raskin gives Feste all his expertise as a European-style clown, using deft physical comedy and some lovely, mellifluous singing (he wrote his own tunes for the clown's familiar lyrics) to create the one character in the play who knows exactly who he is and can laugh at himself as well as others. If Raskin's diction is occasionally less crisp than the rest of the cast's, it doesn't much matter, for his Feste is, as he should be, more ''natural" than anyone else in this merry, mordant roundelay of masks and trickery.
Which brings us to Malvolio, that most unnatural, most obliviously self-important fool. Here Ken Cheeseman creates a comic masterpiece: Utterly blind to his own pomposity, Cheeseman's Malvolio steps gleefully into the trap Maria lays for him, and his preening self-delight as he imagines Olivia in love with him is as hysterically funny as his ultimate disillusionment is poignant. In this fizzy, enchanting ''Twelfth Night," there's no question who must be crowned the Lord of Misrule.
Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com. 
