Your Own Thing

Twelfth Night is becoming the busiest musical off Broadway. It opened (and closed) this month in the form of a sad travesty called Love and Let Love. Last week it was back as a romping delight called Your Own Thing, which does for the kids of the '60s, with their sexual hang-ups and his-and-her looks, something of what West Side Story--alias Romeo and Juliet--did for the rumbling teen-age groups of the '50s. In Your Own Thing, Shakespeare has had the services of a brilliant collaborator from Portland, Ore. Writer-Director Donald Driver, 44, has mounted the story of Viola and Duke Orsino, Olivia and Sebastian on a simple white set that swings with multimedia cinema effects and a hard-rock beat.

Minus Malvolio, Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, the old plot slides surprisingly well into the with-it world. Viola's whim of dressing in men's clothes, inexplicable in the original, fits in quite naturally with the mod look; she and her brother Sebastian wear identical outfits of zippered yellow tunics and rust trousers, and of course their moptops are the same length. The updated plot involves a singing group known as the Apocalypse, one member of which has just been drafted. Viola, calling herself Charlie, fills in for him; when Orsino, here known as Orson, feels himself falling in love with what he assumes is a boy, he consults a psychology book to read up on latent homosexuality.

Your Own Thing tosses off Shakespeare's calculated sexual confusions with jaunty lightheartedness. The songs are deft adaptations of rock rhythm. But the principal light-and-power supply of the show is a loose-jointed, lemur-eyed young lady named Leland Palmer, who as Viola shows that she can mug a laugh out of thin air, detonate a song and dance like a rag doll in a washing machine.

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