‘is that the sort of thing you find funny?” hisses the title character (and target) of Tim Crouch’s solo show, as he endures one humiliation after another.
Well, yes. At least, it’s funny in “I, Malvolio,” one of a series geared to tweens that explores Shakespeare through the point of view of a minor character — in this case, the priggish steward of “Twelfth Night,” the victim of a malicious practical joke.
When we first see him, Crouch’s Malvolio is a pathetic figure, dressed in stained long johns, and sporting a turkey wattle below his neck and a horned headdress. Later he looks even more ridiculous, stripping down to a leopard-skin thong.
“I’m not mad, I’m not mad, I’m not mad,” he insists, and the more the audience laughs, the angrier he becomes. Still hissing, he coerces two theatergoers to help him hang himself, and another to give him a good kick to his backside.
You don’t need to know “Twelfth Night” to understand what’s going on here, thanks to Crouch’s crisp recap of its convoluted plot. But even kids not hip to his provocative riffs on Shakespeare’s classic will respond to its cheeky humor. And cheeky it is, literally: Malvolio even moons us a few times.
He’s also fearsome enough to make Malvolio’s threat, “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!” credible. And he’s not above scolding us, either, ordering us to sit up straight, and berating us for our “dead eyes and slack jaws.”
The kids at Thursday’s matinee ate it up, gleefully enjoying the risqué moments and getting into the spirit of things. This is a challenging theater piece for younger audiences, one that has the courage not to pander and that fully immerses them in the anarchic goings-on. And if it inspires them to actually read Shakespeare’s comedy, it will really have done its job.