The shipwrecked Viola, Shakespeare’s deftest heroine, disguises herself as a man to stay safe while she finds her footing in a foreign land, and Nyong’o presents her as a figure of maximum spirit and pluck. Viola invents male mannerisms on the fly—she realizes a beat late that she should manspread when she sits—and treats her accidental romantic conquest, Countess Olivia, with a kind of merry contempt. Oh plays the countess as an impulsive drama queen who at first rejects all offers of marriage only to fall head over heels for Viola’s cross-dressed messenger. Oddly, Oh doesn’t seem to express the bereavement that is Olivia’s reason—or excuse—for withdrawing from the world of men. (We hear that her brother has died, but when we meet her she’s in a white-and-black evening gown, rollicking around with her staff.) Neither Oh’s dizzy countess nor Nyong’o’s charming, feckless Viola ever takes the reins of this production, but that would be hard to do. Ali has the cast gallop straight through a streamlined script—the show is less than two hours, with no intermission—leaving nuance and character motivations behind.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter