Romeo and Juliet
February
Satellite/Theater
By
Shamrock McShane
When
Romeo and Juliet die, and they’re dying all the time, the whole world mourns.
If the production is any good, we want to die with them.
Of
course in Elizabethan slang, “to die” meant “to come.” Far more than any other
tragedy, Romeo and Juliet is full of
bawdy puns and dirty jokes, which makes you wonder what’s so damn funny about
two nice kids killing themselves.
The
answer is everything and nothing. Ambiguity rules. But Lauren Caldwell, who
proved herself unafraid of Edward Albee’s ambiguities with the Hippodrome’s
production of The Play About the Baby,
is undeterred by Shakespeare’s paradoxes. She plans on plunging right into
them.
“The
whole mood of the play will be carnivalistic,” Caldwell told me over a beer on
the Hipp’s front porch in mid-January, while The Play About the Baby confounded the audience within. Caught up
in Bard-talk, perhaps she was punning on “cannibalistic,” which Romeo and Juliet certainly is.
Romeo and Juliet takes place in a world that
devours its young – ours. “It’s happening all the time,” Lauren lamented.
“Ancient grudge breaks to new mutiny, and nobody even knows anymore what the
ancient grudge is. The conflict is so out of control, violence seems to explode
out of nowhere.”
When
Verona raises the golden statues of Romeo and Juliet at the end of the play,
they are already icons. And icons they have been for, lo, these past four
hundred years. The trick is how to make them human again.
A
sense of retrospect is built into Romeo
and Juliet. It’s like an accident observed in the rear view mirror. Lauren
told me she hopes to jolt the play back to life by slamming our vehicle into
reverse and flooring it.
“The
streets are alive,” she continued, seeing the world of her play, “with gypsies,
street singers, marionettes. The height of optimism. There’s a hopeful feeling.
And then the whole world degenerates and decays, and the vultures and the
ghosts come out.”
We
die, which is to say, we come. As Harold Bloom, the world’s most renown
Bardolator, has pointed out, “The sexual becomes erotic when crossed by the
shadow of death.” Romeo and Juliet thus becomes the high song of eroticism, where unadulterated love is grieved in
its inexorable annihilation.
Niall
McGinty and Marguerite Stimpson play the star-crossed lovers. Needless to say,
neither is in real life the adolescent novitiate in the religion of love that
Shakespeare posits.
Lauren
Caldwell is unconcerned with the discrepancy in age between these actors and
the characters, with good reason. There are two stretches an actor can make
while playing age. Up or down. Forward or backward. You can play someone older
than yourself, in which case you imagine what you have not experienced. Or, you
can play someone younger and rely on memory.
With
Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare managed somehow to synthesize the stretches
because their passion is all about pleasures they have not yet experienced.
They are, both of them, high as a kite on foreplay. And they get higher and
higher until they “die.” So, our now adult actors must vividly remember what
they once imagined.
“If
we play our intentions cleanly,” Lauren Caldwell insisted, “that allows us to
connect with all young people because they’re never beyond us; they’re a part
of us.”
Lauren
Caldwell clearly sees Romeo as a kind of visionary. After all, he says, moments
before laying eyes on Juliet and falling fatally in love, “My mind misgives
some consequence yet hanging in the stars.”
The
stars are balls of fire. They burn up. They “die.”
“So
the play seems to come at us from Romeo’s point of view,” contended Lauren
Caldwell.
Romeo
may be behind the wheel, but he’s not steering. Just before he climaxes, Romeo
turns to his co-pilot, Death, and says: “Thou desperate pilot, now at once run
on the dashing rocks thy seasick weary bark.”
Romeo,
Mercutio, and Tybalt, hopped up on testosterone and mindless macho, start the
death wheel turning, but what in the world has the innocent Juliet done to
deserve this?
She
has been Anne Frank and the Girl in the Play
About the Baby, where Niall was her Boy.
A
play is a living organism and Lauren Caldwell knows that it grows best in the
garden of ensemble. That’s one reason her casts dovetail from play to play and
season to season. “It adds depth to each performance, a richness,” she said.
The Hippodrome’s production of Romeo and
Juliet promises a sumptuous stage picture populated with familiar faces.
“It’s
a cast of twenty-two,” Lauren Caldwell said. “It’s the biggest cast we’ve had
since To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Kevin
Blake, who tore up the stage in the Hipp’s Totally
Weird a few seasons back, is the fiery Tybalt. Bonnie Harrison is the
Nurse. Gregg Jones is Montegue. Mark Sexton, one of the Hipp’s finest resident
actors and also its General Manager, tellingly, is Capulet.
For
Capulet, Juliet’s marriage to Paris is a business deal. Shakespeare lived at
the birth of capitalism, and its major contradiction, between love and wealth,
is fiercely apparent here. Capulet knows that his daughter is a commodity worth
a lot. Romeo, on the other hand, values Juliet beyond value.
Equally
important to the casting, in keeping with the spirit of the gender-swapping
Bard, there are as many actresses in the play as actors. True, in Elizabethan
times, the cast would have been all-male, but that wasn’t Will’s idea.
Lauren
Caldwell plans to turn the crucial role of Friar Laurence into a troubled
priestess played by the superb Sara Morsey.
The
raging ambiguity that abounds in Romeo
and Juliet might turn the play into the tragedy of any number of characters
– Capulet, whose greed seals Juliet’s fate; the Nurse, who betrays her grown
nursling; but most movingly Friar Laurence, who honestly believes “This
alliance may so happy prove to turn your household’s rancor to pure love.”
How
wrong can you be? Friar Laurence fucks it all up and knows it. This is the very
essence of tragedy – dramatic choice, and the wrong damn one. Tragedy is all
about fucking up. That’s why we love it so much – it’s about someone else fucking up.
Romeo
and Juliet are blameless, and so is everyone else really, because no one
knowingly does them wrong. All Romeo and Juliet do wrong is kill themselves,
and we forgive them because they do it out of love. And they would never do it
if they knew they could live forever with each other, which they do, now.
Romeo and Juliet opens at the Hippodrome
State Theater on February 28 and runs through March 30.
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