The stars are aligning for those "star-crossed lovers," as three separate versions of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet hit the stage in the coming weeks.
Each production comes to the classic romance from a different perspective. A touring company captures some of the atmosphere of a performance in Shakespeare's time. An all-male staging delves into questions of gender and sexuality. And a high-school production places the young lovers and their feuding cliques in… a high school. All three have common elements as well, including non-traditional casting and contemporary takes on this age-old tale.
Wherefore art thou?
The American Shakespeare Center's "Rough, Rude & Boisterous Tour" comes to UMass next Tuesday, presented by the Fine Arts Center and the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies. The Virginia-based ensemble follows Renaissance performance principles without trying to reproduce an Elizabethan-era performance or treating the works as museum pieces.
The shows are presented under "universal lighting," with lights up on the audience, too. This suggests the sun- or candle-lit venues Shakespeare's troupe performed in, where the actors could see, and interact with, their audience, breaking down the barriers between performer and spectator. ASC stages productions with minimal scenery and props, like the Globe Theatre of old, and gives a twist to the Elizabethan convention in which the female parts were played by boys. In this production some of the secondary male roles are taken by women.
The company also uses doubling in much the same way a 16th-century traveling troupe would have. In this production, 11 actors play 24 roles. Even the two leads have extra assignments. Josh Carpenter and Brandi Rhome play the title roles and a couple of Romeo's kinsmen.
A glance at the show's publicity poster dispels any lingering notion that the company's Renaissance-flavored approach smacks of stuffy "authenticity." We see a white Romeo and a black Juliet about to kiss, giving the tale of two feuding families the kind of racial tension that West Side Story was built on. And Jim Warren's director's notes are studded with quotations expressing youth's reckless passions—not from Shakespeare but from contemporary troubadours, including the Boss ("No retreat, baby, no surrender") and the King ("Wise men say only fools rush in, but I can't help falling in love with you").
Such sweet sorrow
Shakespeare's R&J, coming next month to TheaterWorks, is, I believe, the company's first flirtation with the Bard. But true to form, the theater that calls itself "Hartford's Off-Broadway" has chosen Joe Calarco's "adaptation" of the play, which premiered Off-Broadway a decade ago.
Calarco's version takes two of those Renaissance stage conventions—role-doubling and boys-playing-girls—to extremes. His R&J imagines four boys at a Catholic boarding school breaking out of their stultifying lessons and strict Thou-shalt-not's to clandestinely rehearse Shakespeare's story of forbidden love.
The play's crosscurrents of societal repression and sexual awakening are mirrored in the two boys playing Romeo and Juliet, as they first recoil from enacting the love scene, then tentatively touch and kiss, and experience a thrilling, scary revelation—to the appalled amazement of their fellows.
While this play isn't really Romeo and Juliet, but a piece about the four boys doing the play, nearly all the dialogue is Shakespeare's. The decidedly non-poetical exceptions are in the schoolroom scenes, where the students chant Latin conjugations and read from a 19th-century text that prescribes proper behavior for young gentlemen and men's and women's separate roles in properly ordered society.
The script calls for a bare stage and only two props—Shakespeare's text and a long swath of fabric that becomes everything from Juliet's bed to a tug-of-war weapon. Calarco says he took inspiration for his R&J not from Dead Poets Society, as many assume, but from The Crucible, where repression leads to irrational action, and Lord of the Flies, in which schoolboys freed from society's constraints descend into primal violence.
Two households,
both alike in dignity
The Romeo and Juliet now in rehearsal at the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter School also takes place in a school, but it's a full-cast rendition with as much emphasis on the warring tribes of Montagues and Capulets as on their children's secret love. The parents' feud infects the kids and spills into the hallways of the school, and the street-fighting of Shakespeare's young blades translates into frenzied classroom brawls.
Director Michael Arquilla's intention is to make the Shakespearean milieu accessible to his actors and audience by creating a familiar world for the characters to live in. Like Calarco, he also plays with gender themes, but in reverse, casting a girl (Sophie Lederman) as Romeo's friend Mercutio. They're platonic pals, but she's secretly in love with him, actually willing to die for him, while he's boyishly oblivious until she dies because of him, setting in motion the play's revenge cycle and the lovers' tragedy.
In this updating, the Capulets' ball, where Romeo and Juliet (Sam Farnsworth and Hannah Levy) meet, is a Halloween party with goofy masks. The Prince of Verona becomes the school's prince-ipal, and the lovers' go-between is their teacher, Friar Lawrence (yes, this one's a Catholic parochial school, too). PVPA's production doesn't make a point of race as ASC's does. Instead, the casting is "color blind," with students of color taking prominent roles including Juliet's nurse, Friar Lawrence and the Prince."
Romeo and Juliet: Nov. 3, American Shakespeare Center, Bowker Auditorium, UMass-Amherst, (413) 545-2511, www.umasstix.com.
Romeo and Juliet: Nov. 13-15, PVPA, 15 Mulligan Dr., South Hadley, (413) 552-1590, www.pvpa.org.
Shakespeare's R&J: Nov. 12-Dec. 20, TheaterWorks, 233 Pearl St., Hartford, (860) 527-7838, www.theaterworkshartford.org.
