Romeo and Juliet
March Satellite/Theater
By Shamrock McShane
I was twenty-three and playing Mercutio in Old Town in Chicago on Wells Street, two blocks from Second City. . .
Gainesville – Romeo and Juliet. One City – One Story? Not by a long shot. Many, many cities, and who knows how many stories?
I write theater and about theater. Here's a theatrician's view of the proceedings.
There were two Romeos and two Juliets in our production in Chi-town, but there was only one Mercutio. There is only one Mercutio. Romeos are plentiful. Juliets rare. But there is only one Meructio.
Our director was a great artist, but crazy, and he was in love with one of the Romeos and put him through hell. The other Romeo was an intrepid interloper. His take on Romeo was "He's just a guy trying to be cool."
He ended up in Hollywood.
The Juliets were night and day, one virginal, the other a slut.
Our set was a giant chessboard. It dwarfed us. So did Second City, where Bill Murray was cutting up. And a few blocks over on Clark Street, the St. Nicholas Theater Company was presenting a new play called American Buffalo.
One City? Our city? Thus Romeo and Juliet becomes a conflict of town and gown, rural and urban, gay and straight, right and left, black and white, class conflict. It brings to mind Rodney King's fervent question: "Can't we all get along?"
No! Haven't we figured that out by now? After all, it's been several millennia. No, we cannot all get along. We are at permanent loggerheads.
At Santa Fe Community College, Professor Bobby Hom conducts a seminar on gender conflict, because there is not a little of that in the play.
"We'll probably never know Shakespeare's sexual preferences," says Norrie Epstein, "though it's likely he was bi-sexual. He was fascinated by sexual ambiguity and the way in which one sex could behave like the other. Some of the most passionate relationships in the plays have been between men."
This is certainly true of Romeo and Juliet where Mercutio jealously tilts at Tybalt for Romeo's attentions.
Borges said there's no such thing as reading, only re-reading. So, one would hope, here in college town, that we're re-reading or re-viewing Romeo and Juliet. So the question should be rephrased: What would happen if we all re-read the same book? We would be thrown into the past, and the past would become present.
For Sarah Bewley, the playwright, Romeo and Juliet rushes back with an altered persepective, grander and yet diminished, for which she faults not the play, but time.
"I actually always liked that play, have a fond spot for it in my heart because of seeing the Zeferelli version when I was fourteen. I'd already fallen in love with Shakespeare from having seen Hamlet on TV the year before, with Richard Chamberlain no less. The stories really hit me in a good way, being a young teen and highly angsty about everything.
"I also loved the version of the play directed by Baz Luhrmann. I was in Tucson teaching a workshop and I had a day without anything scheduled. So I walked to a nearby theater to see a matinee of the film. What was unexpected was that apparently several classes of a local high school were there to see the movie as well. Once again I was totally caught up by the language of the play, and I truly loved the visuals of the Luhrmann film.
"But what really hit me was how this mob of teenagers who, before the movie started, were throwing things, yelling, and generally being obnoxious, became absolutely silent during the movie. When Romeo and Juliet died, you could hear sobbing in the audience. They were completely caught up in the story.
"I was no longer an angsty teen, so to me their death seemed like senseless youthful drama, but it clearly still touched those who were teenagers in the same way it touched me at fourteen.
"Romeo and Juliet is a play that doesn't age, though we do as viewers. I can't see it the same way I saw it at fourteen. It's impossible with my lifetime of experience to view the love of these two young people the as I did then. I still enjoy the language, still enjoy seeing how the story is told, but it can't ever touch my heart as it did when I was fourteen.
"But someone who is a teenager, a peer with Romeo and Juliet, does see it that way. To me, that's the pure form of the play, the way someone that age will hear and feel it."
Sheila Bishop, diva
"The hollywood version with DiCaprio and whatever her name is, had cool costumes and bad, bad acting.
"While I revel in A Midsummer's Nights Dream and adore The Tempest and am stimulated/annoyed by The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet leaves me with lukewarm as a reader or viewer. It makes me think of the first Star Wars. Romeo and Luke Skywalker are both whiney and annoying in a pimply adolescent male sort of way. As a reader/viewer, I end up wanting to slap some sense into Romeo. Romeo isn't my idea of a hero. He's a chump. The clever side kicks are much more interesting. Mercutio is a more engaging character but he ends up dead early on, which moves the dramatic action of the play, but leaves us with less interesting male characters."
Scholarly interests are served as Dr. John Van Hook presents various editions of the play in the Special Collections Reading Room of Smathers Library on the UF campus.
Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim mined Romeo and Juliet for the ore they melded into West Side Story.
Baz Luhrmann blew it up and re-assembled the shards on South Beach to make his movie of the play.
What emerges is this. Romeo and Juliet is all over the place, like a Jackson Pollock painting.
Michael Moore has explored our culture of violence brilliantly in Bowling for Columbine. It seems we advocate peace on our highways and in our schools and, in general, domestically, but globally we favor war against the oil owners.
An art exhibit called The Culture of Violence continues at the Harn Museum through April 27, and on March 22 high school students address the issue with various art forms. When Moore asks Marilyn Manson in his film what he would say to the Columbine students, Manson answers sagely: "I wouldn't say a thing. I'd listen to what they had to say."
Whenever I want to know anything about Shakespeare, I go to Sid Homan, Shakespeare scholar and theatrician. I asked him about the dimensions he sees inhabiting the play, because I had lived in the world of the play but you always need locating in Shakespeare's universe.
"Some of this, by the way, is based on my experience co-directing Romeo and Juliet at the Hippodrome with Greg Hausch back in the mid 1980s," Sid told me as he readied for our first rehearsal of As You Like It, which opens at the Acrosstown Repertory in April. I play Jaques.
What follows is like Galileo's description of what he sees through the telescope. You marvel as the play does not so much unfold as crystallize. And there shining brightly in the night sky are the themes of Romeo and Juliet that do indeed embrace us all.
"The play moves from male violence to female death, from the opening street scene, where the two rival families clash, to Juliet's tomb. But death, the female, sexuality, and violence are intermingled. Old Capulet races out with his group as part of the opening fray, and calls for a 'sword' but Lady Capulet cynically observes he needs a 'crutch' instead--he is at once too old to fight; but 'crutch' is also Elizabethan slang for any device to help erection.
"And Juliet, in her suicide, finding that Romeo has not left enough poison in the cup, is forced to use his dagger, on which she makes a sexual parallel: she will be the dagger's sheath (vagina) if it be content to 'rest' in her. 'To make the wound' or 'a wound' was Elizabethan slang for the male role in the sexual act.
"Juliet says: 'I'll to my ghostly father (the Friar). If all else fails, myself hath power--to die.' Confronted by male violence, by a potentially impotent father who would nevertheless dictate who is to be her husband, she will go to the priest, the surrogate father, even as she recognizes that the only recourse a woman has in this male-dominated world is 'to die.' And as McShane well knows, 'to die' was the generic Elizabethan pun: to cease life, to have intercourse (at the moment of sexual climax the partners were said 'to die'—'the little death' as the French call it)."
THE SEQUEL, A BUDDY PIC
"Over the bodies of the city's two most promising children, the two old men, Capulet and Montague, vow, in a sort of male competition that echoes the opening of the play, to erect a tomb for their rival's dead child, each competing in this death tribute by vowing to outdo each other. That is, in a sense the death of the children--of Romeo and Juliet, Tybalt, Paris--solves nothing: the old men renew the competition which, the next performance, leads to the clash in the street between rival families."
West Side Story and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet play the Reitz Union. www.union.ufl.edu/cinema.
Poltical Forecast.
"Race is not an issue here, as we define race, but, of course, the antagonism between the Capulets and the Montagues is based on the same sort of stereotypes, the sense of superiority and difference, the obsession with one's family, that characterize racial conflicts. And this, to be sure, was precisely what Bernstein and crowd hit upon when they translated Shakespeare's play into West Side Story, with its clash of whites and Puerto-Ricans. The creators of West Side Story, as I recall, originally wanted the clash to be between Christians and Jews. And we have had in our time, especially after
the protests years of the 1960s, many productions of Romeo and Juliet which transformed the two families into whites and African-Americans, or any two conflicting groups. McShane, are Irish and English next?"
I defy you, stars!
"The world of this early tragedy is, I think, one where human will plays only a small part. Even the best of intentions, the best plans willed by man or woman, go wrong: the trick in the tomb, whereby Juliet is to be saved from a loveless, not to mention bigamous marriage, leads instead to the death of the newly married couple. It is a world of fate, chance, random accident, similar to the world depicted in the wretched production of Pyramus and Thisby in A Midsummer Night's Dream, which bears, I should add, parallels with Romeo and Juliet was produced in the same year, 1595."
Gregg Jones, who plays Montague, Romeo's father, in the Hipp production, leads a discussion of the play at SFCC on March 26.
"The show is going to be a visual feast and I think Lauren Caldwell's concept will appeal to our audience. I don't want to misrepresent what she is attempting, but I will say that we are doing a deeply considered treatment of certain themes presented by the play including honor, the conflict between social responsibility and personal freedom/desire, and the power of institutions (family, marriage, parental control) over our lives. I am thoroughly enjoying working with the very talented cast, including many UF grad students and Hippodrome interns. It is a privilege to be involved in the process with such a gifted cast and director. Lauren seethes vision and it's infectious!"
Isn't that novel?
The popular local novelist Shelley Fraser Mickle will be having at the play in her Gainesville Sun column "Novel Conversations," and you can join in, where it might be pointed out how the dramatic form is intrinsically at odds with the bourgeois art form – the novel.
|
