The Raven Players, resident theater company at Healdsburg’s Raven Performing Arts Theater, announced today their popular Shakespeare-under-the-stars performances will return in July and August with Twelfth Night (with a twist). These shows are free and open to the public.

What’s “the twist” in the Raven Players’ production? “I won’t spoil our spunky take on the traditional ending,” said director Steven David Martin, who is also the company’s artistic director. “But I will say I’ve always found it odd that the same person who penned, ‘To me she is married, not unto my clothes,’ also wrote plays where the female lead spends 90% of the play dressed as a man and inevitably a woman falls in love with the cross-dressed woman but drops her like a hot potato when the cross-dressed woman’s twin brother shows up because … wait for it … he is a he, not a she.”

There were a few other changes, as well. “Suffice it to say that we ‘borrowed’ a few lines from other Shakespeare plays and sonnets, then tied it all together with some verse by a lesser writer,” Martin explained. “Voilà, we have an ending that to me makes a little more emotional sense.”

If the surprise twist isn’t enough to rile the purists, Martin set the production in the roaring 1920s, whose jazz age spirit is the perfect environment for this high-spirited tale of love, lust, and misunderstanding.

Twelfth Night (with a twist)
July 21-23; July 28-30; August 4-6, 7:30 pm
West Plaza Park, Healdsburg, Chairs & Blankets Recommended
Information: raventheater.org/twelfthnight