Q&A with Twelfth Night director Mei Ann Teo

Director Mei Ann Teo, currently an Artistic Leader at Ping Chong and Company in New York City, shares the vision for Folger Theatre’s production of Twelfth Night. Shakespearean original practice, the soulful pop of local icon composer Be Steadwell, and an ensemble proposition all inform this production that Teo describes as “hilarious, sexy, and devastating.”

 Can you share your directorial concept for Twelfth Night?

Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night right after he wrote Hamlet—that fact highlights for me the way that this play also starts in grief, and that all the action is triggered by the possibility to live beyond pervasive grief through that most disruptive force of love. There’s a great quote by contemporary philosopher Kelly Oliver, “Love is an ethics of difference that thrives on the adventure of otherness.” ¹ Falling in love pulls the characters of Twelfth Night out of deep mourning and into adventures with the others they encounter. We locate our Twelfth Night in the now, in this moment of crumpling empire, where so much of what we thought our reality was is being challenged daily. Not in a pretty garden, but in a brutalist concrete underground space that’s been underwater like military batteries, and also like the secret clubs where intricacies of desire cross all boundaries, stirring up hidden fantasies and possibilities.

Gathered here are a collective of folx from the fringes, delighting in the subversive nature of fluid desire and bringing their own milieus to bear. We pull on inspiration like Thom Browne’s high-fashion reclamation of Elizabethan codpieces for cheeky anachronism, the soulful pop of Be Steadwell, our composer, and bring into play for these raucous romps some touches of elegant kink to heighten the play’s sensuality, subversion, and joyful excess.

How does the original staging of plays in Shakespeare’s time with boy actors dressed as women who then put on breeches to play young men inform your approach to the production?  

In terms of original practice, you have all these layers of performance of gender, which is in itself a subversive act that requires you to suspend your disbelief when imagining young boys as women, allowing for all these delicious slips and slides of desire between the characters. So even 400 years ago, this play—and how it was done—was disrupting a normative structure, a needed carnivalian release. In our Twelfth Night in 2025, we aren’t doing an all-male or all-female production, instead, it is a reflection of the world that we live in—of all kinds of people learning the intricacies of their desire and how boundless and valid love is in all its forms.

There seems to be a real playfulness emerging out of this approach, too. Can you share more about your ensemble and community-building approach to directing?

Ensemble creation and devising is how I learned to make theater. In Singapore at the age of 17, at the Theatre Studies and Drama program at Victoria Junior College, we made theatre using non-hierarchical devising techniques, discovering what we wanted to make work about and why. That ethos has remained and grown in my work, whether it be documentary theater and devising new works with communities to ensemble created works to directing new plays. The collective lens is really about the recognition that we are interrelated and interconnected: You never really see me without seeing my family, without seeing my history, and that we are all more than what role we play. Our artistry is extensive because of the complexity of our lived experiences. The concept of this world of Twelfth Night allows for a significant invitation to the actor. In our audition, I asked them to prepare any text that they connected with in the play, and to prepare a scene impossible to perform with one person and do it by themselves. The auditions revealed the imaginative artistry of each performer and had immense range in the novel use of puppets, hilarious powerpoints, to cheeky audience participation. We have gathered a cast of extraordinary and virtuosic artists who are bringing so much to the table.

Anne Bogart (director and Artistic Director of SITI Theater) has said that whenever you’re watching a performance, you’re also witnessing the dynamics of the process and the group. My hope is that in the performances of our show, you will also have access to the utter delight we experience in rehearsal.

You come from a multiplicity of forms in theatre, having held artistic leadership positions at Musical Theatre Factory and Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and now at Ping Chong and Company, known for interview-based works. How is that showing up in your vision for Twelfth Night?

I have worked on musicals, classic texts, documentary theatre, and developed many new works. I’m approaching Twelfth Night like it’s a new play with music and phenomenal poetry, made by this ensemble of artists bringing their whole idiosyncratic selves to the fore. The first person I knew I wanted to collaborate with was Be Steadwell, a brilliant local composer and multi-hyphenate artist whose music is one of my favorite expressions of love beyond boundaries. Be’s approach has been deeply collaborative with the cast as well, from sending out a survey beforehand to ask how they learn and get a sense of their musicality, to developing the sonic landscape with us in rehearsal along with Erika Johnson our musician. All of the other directors leading the room with me—Choreographer Tony Thomas, Voice and Text Coach Jen Rabbitt Ring, and Intimacy and Fight Choreographer Sierra Young—are intentional about meeting and collaborating with each actor where they are to make a Twelfth Night unique to us.