SOURCE: "Acts of Darkness," in New York Magazine, Vol. 19, No. 27, July 14, 1986, pp. 62-3.

Is it cynicism, insensitivity, or merely total benightedness that prompts the New York Shakespeare Festival to mount the kind of travesty of Twelfth Night now on view in Central Park? The subtitle What You Will was surely not meant as an encouragement to cast rank amateurs or equally rank professionals, and to camp up a high comedy into the lowest, most effete farce. Either Joe Papp and his director, Wilford Leach, think that a non-paying audience enjoying a night under the stars does not know any better or ask for more (which may be true, but is no excuse) or else they are incapable of responsible thinking and don't know any better themselves. Neither hypothesis is particularly cheering.

It is, of course, possible (though not advisable) to turn the more broadly comical scenes into outright...