Austin 360
Muffled medical masking might seem antithetical to the performance of a play by William Shakespeare, who created whole worlds with spoken words. Yet a staging of the playwright's "Twelfth Night" outdoors on the St. Edward's University campus proved that this romantic comedy loses none of its charm, clarity or cleverness, even masked.
After all, ancient Greek actors wore full facial masks, some outfitted with little megaphones. Two thousand years later, Italian commedia players donned half masks that emphasized of the durability of the form's stock characters. And many other performance traditions around the world depend on the cloaked practice of masking.