Director’s Note

When I first visited The House of Eternal Return, I was enchanted, amazed and deeply moved. The experience had the hazy familiarity of a dream, as if I was walking through the manifestation of an inner mind world and a veil was lifted off my imaginative subconscious. The flawless execution of creating a work of art that is both deeply personal and utterly accessible is a testament to the creativity, vision and craftsmanship of the entire Meow Wolf team.

Meow Wolf’s The House of Eternal Return is a perfect setting for Shakespeare's beautiful and melancholy comedy Twelfth Night. Narrative hides around every corner and possibility behind ever door. It is a Utopia, both a paradise and a nowhere land, and the perfect place for love. It is a place that reflects love and madness and like Twelfth Night is perplexing, deceptive, wondrous, ecstatic, majestic, playful, chaotic and always surprising. Illyria, in Shakespeare's play, is a land of love, and the play is about every gradation of love: selfish and selfless, passionate and repressed, ecstatic and melancholy. 

When working on Shakespeare, what never fails to astonish me is the total humanism that permeates every one of his plays. Shakespeare came out of a theatre tradition where vice and virtue were delineated on stage as actual characters in ecclesiastical drama. But Shakespeare was not interested in demonizing or deifying. His characters are humans: confused, foolish, sublime, heroic, cowardly, jealous humans that, most importantly, contain the extraordinary capacity to change and be changed by others.

The International Shakespeare Center is a wonderful company in an amazing town and I am deeply privileged to be collaborating with individuals of such innovation and caliber. I am also thrilled and honored to perform in such an extraordinary space that already holds so many memories and has touched so many people.

Ariana Karp, Director