Enough; no more: 'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

I'm pretty sure the reason it took me so long to start going to Shakespeare plays again was because of my four children. At first they were too young for me to feel comfortable leaving them with a babysitter. I was worried about what might happen while I was gone. But by the time the youngest was three - that was in 1994 - I figured any babysitter worth the money ought to be able to take care of herself or, in some cases, himself when left alone with my children. I credit Shakespeare with this giant step.

Leading up to that step, I had been doing some much-needed catching up. It will give you a hint of how much catching up I needed to do when I tell you that I took a Shakespeare class at BYU and never actually finished reading any of the assigned plays. I think I had seen one or two of them on tv, and I let that suffice. One of those I had not seen (at least, seen and remembered) was Hamlet, and until I started studying the play in preparation for Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film, the only thing I knew about it was that Hamlet talked to a ghost, himself, and a skull; that at one point he got captured by pirates, and at another he put on a play; that his girlfriend went crazy; and that by the end everyone pretty much died. I got a C+ in the class, a fact which has been a source of shame for me ever since.

I started out in easy steps by going to our public library. I took all the kids along and let them look at books while I checked out the video section, particularly the PBS kind of stuff. Back then, they charged for checking out videos and I had limited funds. When it was time to make our selection, I'd be saying to the kids things like, "Wouldn't you like to watch King Lear? It's got a big storm, and sword fights, and one guy pokes out another guy's eyes, just like you're not supposed to do when you play with your friends."

But they didn't care. They always wanted to get something like My Little Pony: The Movie or The Land before Time III: The Time of the Great Giving. For me, it was the time of the great giving in. We went home with the animated, anthropomorphized critters.

So when I found out that the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego was doing Twelfth Night, I thought "This is a great opportunity to introduce the children to the concept of babysitters." Twelfth Night had been one of my favorite plays ever since I saw it back in 1975, so I was very much looking forward to an enjoyable evening.

I think by that time I had developed an appreciation for the variety of interpretations that Shakespeare's plays lend themselves to. I considered myself a rather open-minded viewer of the plays, and I still do. I don't care if they're done in modern or period dress (except early 1970s). I'm not disturbed by some of the far-fetchedness of Shakespeare's plots. I don't agonize over the disparity between Elizabethan sensibilities and those we hold today. In fact, I suppose that my main criteria for enjoying Shakespeare may be, first, how realistically the roles are acted; second, with how much skill and understanding the lines are spoken; and third, how much the production concept contributes to the first two points. I think it was my experience at this production of Twelfth Night that crystallized all that for me.

The play was directed by Laird Williamson. In his director's notes, he wrote of the "bittersweet wistfulness" that diffuses through the play. It was a little too diffused, I guess, because I was unable to sense it at all. There was just too much laughing going on.

I like to laugh as much as the next person, and sometimes more, and I know Twelfth Night is a comedy, but there are some sad and disturbing things going on in the play. In this production, which was set in some bizarre sort of dreamlike, nondescript landscape, everything - with one exception - was played for laughs. I sat there wondering what Williamson was up to. "Is he just trying to be really, really different?" I asked myself. I wasn't the only one with such questions. When the lights came up during the interval, the woman next to me turned and said, "Have you ever seen anything quite like this?" No...no, I haven't, I assured her.

I think I got a clue to what the director was up to when Feste made his comment in 3.1 about a sentence being like a glove to a good wit: "how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward." Only Feste didn't call it a "chev'ril glove" as is written. He called it a "kidskin glove". "Chev'ril" means "kidskin", but I could only suppose that Williamson supposed that most people wouldn't know what "chev'ril" meant, so he changed it. (See #20 in "Things I will not do when I direct a Shakespeare production".) So I started thinking, "Maybe Williamson approached Twelfth Night in this unanchored, slapstick, bizarre manner because he though his audience wouldn't understand Shakespeare. He wants to make sure we enjoy it anyway. He just doesn't want us to go away bored."

I don't know. Things were very topsy turvy. The funniest lines were often thrown away - spoken too rapidly, or hammed up, or (worst of all) gabbled through in a manner that told you the actor didn't understand what he or she was saying. (I found that to be most often the case with the actress playing Viola, which made me very sad because she's my favorite character.) Serious or sad moments were accompanied by a piece of silly business, as if to remind the audience that this is one of Shakespeare's most popular comedies, by gum, and you will get a kick out of it!

That's why, in the one bit that was played really seriously - when Feste looked at Malvolio in his dark confinement (which was a huge urn with a lid, which Feste lifted off so he could see) - Feste's sudden, horrified screaming was jarring (pun intended) and almost out of place. What, no laugh? Are we to suddenly sympathize with the simpering steward who has been milking giggles from the audience all night? Feste can see Malvolio in the urn; the audience cannot. Perhaps it would have helped if they could. I know I was horrified when he first appeared after reading Maria's letter in a strange pseudo-Elvis outfit with cross-gartered yellow-spangled bell-bottoms and an open shirt exposing his hairy chest.

Well, even though I missed the bittersweet stuff, I laughed along with the rest of the audience because it was funny, after all. My personal favorite was Dan Shor as Sir Andrew - sort of a Laurel to Sir Toby's Hardy who, incidentally, brought the only true moment of heartbreak to the play. Sir Toby, Maria, and Feste were all well played. Viola and Olivia were adequate (which for me means disappointing). But poor Orsino was just lost. I was surprised at what a non-entity he was in this production. I kept reminding myself whenever he came on stage that, oh yes, he's a character in this play, too.

Well, it was an experiment, one in which I learned two important things: 1. my children could occasionally be left with babysitters and I could return and find a minimum of destruction, and 2. depending on the production, not even my favorite plays will always give me that combined emotional/intellectual high I get out of well-performed Shakespeare.