Where is Illyria?

Oh, yeah, that's right, it's Albania . . .

This weekend I went to a nearby town (by nearby I mean only 5 hours away!) to see a performance of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, directed by my friend Sarah. They adapted the language quite a bit (honestly now, Shakespeare is usually difficult to understand even for most native English speakers), but I think that they did a great job with the adaptation in making it still sound formal and Old-Englishy but understandable. The kids did a great a job- I was sooooooooo impressed with their acting and comedy as well as their memorization (now tell me, could you do a two hour play in a foreign language? No? Neither could I!). They used physical comedy well, were generally easy to understand and seemed really comfortable in their roles. I really have to give a shout out to Sarah because she has done great work with these kids. I saw some of the same kids perform A Christmas Carol last fall and although that was also a good show, I have to say that there was great improvement in this production. It was easier to understand, funnier and better acted.

So if you didn't remember (been a while since you read Shakespeare . . . ) Twelfth Night takes place on the mysterious shores of Illyria when a ship wreck washes up on shore. And just in case you didn't know, the mysterious shores of Illyria are now the (not so mysterious) shores of Albania (and also parts of Croatia and Montenegro). Albanians in general are really proud of their Illyirian heritage, especially that the Albanian language is supposedly the last of the Illyrian tongues (and why the Albanian language is different from all the other languages surrounding it- not Slav, not Latin, not Greek, but Illyrian!). The name that most of us use when referring to this country (Albania) was actually the name of an Illyrian tribe that lived here (the Albanians themselves call the country Shqipëria, the land of the Eagles). Anyway, so the costumes for the show were traditional Albanian clothing (kostuma populore), which, when you think about it are probably very accurate as far as period clothing goes- it is much more likely that the Illyrians (at any point in history) would be wearing traditional Albanian clothes than they would be wearing Victorian English clothing . . .

One of the best parts of the show was a guest appearance of another PCV, Dan. He had a non-speaking background role, but for the PCVs in the audience he was a dose of extra comedy in an already funny show. First, seeing any American in Albanian garb can get a chuckle, but he was also playing a çiftelia, prancing around stage during scene changes and making eyes at the high school girls . . . At the end of the show, the students did a special presentation for Dan as he is leaving in a few weeks. Many of them were also on the MUN team that he ran and he took some of them last year to a theatre camp in Texas with another PCV. Their words about his effect on their lives teared up almost everyone in the audience.

Anyway, great job Dan and Sarah and the Rreshen Theatre Company!