Many people who frequent the theatre or English majors would recognize the lines “If music be the food of love play on” or “Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.”

What many don’t know is that these lines are from William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the U.Va. Drama Department’s latest production.

Twelfth Night is a comedy about a shipwreck, cross-dressing, love and mistaken identity. In all of this confusion, it’s easy to get lost. Luckily, the director of Twelfth Night, Theresa Davis, has directed the piece before.

“It’s been an adventure coming back to the same text with a new group of actors,” Davis said.

For Davis, Twelfth Night is ultimately a play about love and loss coupled with joy and debauchery.

“The scenes are universal, they speak to humanity,” Davis quoted one of her actors as saying during a cast workshop.

The workshop, directed by Andrew Wade the former head of voice for the Royal Shakespeare Company, was meant to help the cast with the language of the Bard, which Davis compared to learning a foreign tongue.

Any director tackling a work of Shakespeare would certainly need a muse to conquer his beautiful, yet extremely difficult language.

“As a director I’m always looking for evocative research or period research … [Something that] stimulates your creative mind in some way.”

For Twelfth Night her muse came to her while listening the music of Stefan Pompougnac in a restaurant. Davis said the music made her think of the play and subsequently inspired a lot of the work.

Also inspired was the audition process. The chair of the Drama Department, Tom Bloom, specifically requested that Davis hold auditions for Twelfth Night in the fall instead of the spring of the previous semester so first year students would have the chance to be involved. The cast includes U.Va. students of all years. It also includes two drama grad students, Autumn Shiley as Viola and Karie Miller as Olivia, and an entire design team of drama graduate students. The cast even has one professional actor, G DeCandia, in the role of Orsino.

A cast of such wide range and talent is best for speaking to the audience.

“Shakespeare’s work is very audience censored,” Davis said. “…We watch theatre like we’re going to the movies and if we do that we miss the opportunity to have an exchange in the moment…. [The] audience becomes another character of the play, they see the journey of each character.”

Audience involvement is especially heightened with the holiday spirit of the epiphany, the time of celebration in which Twelfth Night takes place.

“That’s what we really hope this piece is about, this sense of celebration.” Davis said. “…I wish people were less polite when they came to the theatre.I wish when they had impulses to speak out ….During Shakespeare’s time they did it…. [And it] truly was an event, a celebration.”

To get into the holiday spirit come celebrate Twelfth Night on November 29, 30 and December 1, 5-8 at 8 pm at Culbreth Theatre.