Doug Bilitch and Christina Lind in "Twelfth Night"

Shakespearean scholars smarter than I have generally agreed that Shakespeare did not consider himself an author. There is no evidence that he took much interest, if any, in the publishing of his plays, and it was not until seven years after his death that a comprehensive volume was published as the First Folio. He had no rights to the finished copy of his plays; they belonged to the company with whom he worked.

Finn Wittrick

This leads those smarter people to call him a dramatist, rather than an author, and to conclude that there was a fundamental difference in the Elizabethan approach to playmaking, one that was more collaborative and less reverential, that treated a play not as a finished artifact on paper, but as an active, organic happening. They didn’t call it a play until it was on a stage.

He seemed to have little interest in historical accuracy, to the frustration of plenty of historians, nor does he apologize for having blatant contradictions in basic realities, such as location and lapse of time, infuriating thousands of dramaturgs.

This may be a problem for those enlightened intellects, but for those of us taking on the plebeian task of putting a play on its feet, it is nothing but liberating. If Shakespeare, who apparently never left England, could set a play in the Mediterranean country of Illyria and then have the characters rendezvous at the Elephant, which was a notorious London brothel, or if he could endow the ancient Greeks in Midsummer Night’s Dream with distinctly English folk-lore, why should we feel beholden to put actors in Renaissance tights and have them strum lutes, instead of throwing them in ripped jeans and have them break some guitar strings?

Connor Kelly-Eiding as Viola

Shakespeare was immensely successful in making ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient Scotland, Verona, Denmark, and some mystical island off the coast of Milan all relevant and exciting to the audiences of his time and place. My co-director Richard Gilbert-Hill and I have been fascinated with the possibility of injecting our Twelfth Night with the same strain of immediacy for our 21st-century Los Angelenos. For instance, the notion of bloodline nobility seems outdated to us as a concept, unless we put it in the context of the Hiltons or the Kardashians — in which case we are even more familiar with our royal families than the Elizabethans were, for we’ve been watching them in our living rooms.

Twelfth Night revolves around the themes of illusion and reality, reveling in the human capacity to mistake and misunderstand what is real and what is imagined, both in the physical world and within their own souls. Our 2011 American culture is primed for this sort of questioning, when every maxim surrounding politics, sex, science, media, class, race, seems often on the brink of upheaval. In a world where we can create or impersonate an entire identity in front of a personal computer, how can we not relate to a girl who cross-dresses to be near the man she loves, or a woman who marries the identical twin brother of the girl she was actually in love with? Didn’t we just see that on a rerun of Desperate Housewives?

Emerson Collins and Lonni Silverman

So, with a minimal set and costumes mostly supplied from the actors’ own closets, we’re letting the play be as irreverent as it wants to be without bending it out of shape. Actually, because we have less of an imaginative leap to take than we would if we were time-traveling backwards 400 years, the text is allowed to grow organically within and out of each actor, as they actually exist in the here-and-now. That has been the most surprising and exciting thing. Throwing ourselves into this modern party may be distancing ourselves from the perceptions of the monumental author that is “Shakespeare,” but it is getting us closer and closer to the man who wrote plays.

Twelfth Night, presented by Mechanicals Theatre Group. Opens Dec. 2. Plays Fri.- Sat. 8 pm; Sun. 7 pm. Through Dec. 18. Tickets: Pico Playhouse, 10508 W Pico Blvd, Los Angeles. www.mechanicalstheatregroup.com.

***All Twelfth Night production photos by Eric Bilitch

Finn Wittrock: With the Mechanicals: The Altruists, The Laramie Project, Matt and Ben, Moonchildren: Elsewhere in the LA area: The Matchmaker, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Noise Within. Director: Twelfth Night, 12 Angry (Men), Rhinoceros and House Humans. Soon to appear on Broadway as Happy Loman in Death of a Salesman, directed by Mike Nichols. Off-Broadway: Tony Kushner’s The Illusion, Signature Theatre; Age of Iron, Classic Stage Company. Regional Theater: Romeo & Juliet, The Shakespeare Theatre; Candida, Berkshire Theatre Festival; L’Histoire du Soldat, Ravinia Music Festival; Prince of York, Shakespeare and Company. At Juilliard: The Greeks, Part II: The Murders, Ghosts, Twelfth Night. Film and TV: Harry’s Law, Criminal Minds, Torchwood: Miracle Day, All My Children, Joel Schumacher’s Twelve, The Beautiful Life, CSI: Miami, Halloweentown High, ER, Cold Case. It has been a joy to work with this cast and to collaborate with the wonderful Richard G Hill.