“When I first read that,” he said, “I was going through some heavy stuff in my life. I asked myself, ‘Should I exist? Do I have a reason for my existence?’ And honestly, I couldn’t think of one. Not one single reason. But somehow, that didn’t make me want to end things the way I thought it would. Instead, it made me want to find a reason for my existence. That was the start of a quest for me. Just as I hope that this introduction to Shakespeare will be the start of a quest for you.”

Ziggy hoisted his legs onto the ledge and stood up. Tucked his hands behind his back and paced, exploring the generous stage space.

“Twelfth Night may not be as heavy as Hamlet,” he said, “but it tackles some themes: the thin line between love and suffering, the ambiguity of gender, the folly of ambition. Although this is mostly told in the form of a hilarious love triangle.”

Ziggy went on to explain the nuts and bolts of Twelfth Night: a shipwreck separates Viola from her twin brother, Sebastian. (Yep, a fictional Sebastian. Three guesses who gets his part.) Viola thinks Sebastian is dead. She disguises herself as a man, takes on the name Cesario, and gets a job serving Duke Orsino, who she decides is a hunk, a hunk of burning love. Duke Orsino, however, has his sights set on the wealthy countess Olivia. The Duke asks Cesario—aka Viola—to woo Olivia for him. Olivia, however, has a thing for Cesario and confesses her love to “him.”

This is the main story of Twelfth Night. But there’s also a weird side story in which Olivia’s steward, Malvolio—who is kind of a pompous dillweed—gets pranked by other characters in Olivia’s social sphere into thinking that Olivia has a thing for him. The cast of characters in on this Elizabethan-era episode of Punk’d includes: Olivia’s chaotic uncle, Sir Toby Belch; her rich would-be suiter, Sir Andrew Aguecheek; her servants, Maria and Fabian; and her melancholy jester, Feste.

Basically, everyone hates Malvolio, and you would, too, if you knew him, and he is about to get what was coming to him

“Now that we’ve got that out of the way,” said Ziggy, “let’s talk about auditions. They’re happening right now.”

The entire circle’s reactions ranged from “Huh?” to “Shit” to “Sweet baby Jesus on a unicorn in outer space.” That last one was unspoken, but I could see the essence of it in Imogen’s eyes.

Okay, maybe I was projecting. That’s what I was thinking. But to be fair, Imogen didn’t seem like she wasn’t thinking it. Her dilated pupils were like tiny screaming mouths.

Ziggy walked offstage, vanished behind a frumpy red curtain, and returned with a Proustian stack of typed pages. They were divided intermittently by sheets of construction paper, separating individual scripts.