Currently, there is a cultural conversation surrounding our generation’s obsession with seeking out relics of the past and attempting to fuse them into something functional within the present context. This transmutation is something that the Laredo Theater Guild International executed perfectly with its fall production of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. While the script maintains the language and traditions of Shakespearean theater, the cast and crew seamlessly integrate modern references, reminding audiences that, despite the centuries separating us from the world of the play, the questions it prompts about identity, desire, and perception remain all too familiar.
A poignant example of the creative choice to blend the old with the new arrives upon Cesario’s reception into Olivia’s chambers. Before meeting the mysterious stranger, Olivia prompts Malvolio for her veil — a small gesture that coincides with the plot’s larger themes of disguise and concealment — yet instead of a veil, she is handed a pair of sunglasses. While this unexpected contemporary touch adds to the playfulness and humor of the production, it also carries with it a surprising amount of meaning.
Sunglasses, akin to a veil, create a barrier between the wearer and the onlooker. There is a juxtaposition in the way they conceal the eyes while simultaneously drawing attention to the act of looking.
This imagery on stage immediately conjured up the memory of Joan Didion, whose dark sunglasses became inseparable from her public image as a literary icon. In photographs, Didion often appears behind those obscured lenses, allowing her to observe the world while still keeping something of herself hidden. That same tension exists throughout Twelfth Night, as the characters are constantly looking, yet misreading one another due to the constructed identities they build based on what they think they see.
It is precisely these subtle intersections between past and present that make this production as effective as it is. The sunglasses do not erase the distance between Shakespeare’s world and ours; they highlight that distance while concurrently illustrating how easily the themes can transcend time.
Theater has always existed in the in-between: past, present, and future.
Shakespeare wrote for an audience that existed hundreds of years in the past, yet a modern Laredo audience can still laugh at the same romantic confusion, recognize the same insecurities, and understand the desire to be seen for who we truly are. The material — costumes, references, props — may change, but the underlying humanity within those questions remains.
It is through LTGI’s understanding of the universal that Twelfth Night ascends from being merely an entertaining play from the past into an integral addition to the larger artistic conversation — one that revolves around how art that has already been created can connect with what artists are creating now, ultimately influencing the art that will be created and discovered in the future.
(Xiomarra Milann, the City’s Poet Laureate, is a borderland storyteller, multidisciplinary artist, activist, and educator whose roots lay in Laredo. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UTEP, and her writing has been published in Sybil Journal, Querencia Press, and Acentos Review, among others. She has been the recipient of fellowships with MoveTexas, the Rowan Foundation, and The Heart of It. She was nominated for Sundress Press’ Best of Net 2025, a finalist for the Jack McCarthy Book Prize in 2024, shortlisted for the 2024 Peach Pit Grant, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023. Follow her journey on Instagram @90strashpop.)
(Photos by Katelyn Kahn)
