Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" is perhaps the most iconic love story. Some high schools read "Hamlet," others "Macbeth," but everyone has read "Romeo and Juliet." Even more than our memories of struggling with iambic pentameter, "Romeo and Juliet" shaped some of our earliest thoughts about love.
With production support from the GLBTA Resource Center, Rude Mechanicals' latest staging - "Romeo and Julien" - adapts the framework of this classic love story to modern times, provoking powerful commentary on our generation's own taboos. The Montagues still hate the Capulets, but "Romeo and Julien" tells the tragic love story between two men. Staged with passionate and personal connection to the work, the piece succeeds in challenging our assumptions about relationships.
James Randle, a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences and School of International Service who plays Julien, said that the transformation of the play's love story did not change the nature of the play. Rather, it deepened its themes.
"Had this been a homosexual love story, it would have colored all those other personal relationships," he said. For example, the director chose to make the nurse character a male to create the only male character that Julien feels he can talk to.
Director Janice Sierra, a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, said she was attracted to the unique storytelling capacity of theater as a way to convey her message of tolerance.
"Theater's so close to my heart," she said. "People get such different things out of it."
The production preserves the classic language and characters of the play, and in doing so really makes the audience re-imagine the play it thinks it knows so well. This is an unquestionably serious interpretation - just a different one. Romeo and Julien still have that fated moment at the party where they see each other across the room, and their love unfolds with the same blindness and tragedy.
Sierra said she wanted to work with such a famous love story to get people to really think about love in a different way.
"This is arguably one of the best known love stories," she said. "And I wanted to show that it doesn't matter who is doing the loving."
Many find the original play inaccessible because they can't appreciate the taboo nature of the main character's love; we've evolved into a time where feuds between families rarely shape our understanding of acceptable relationships. Transforming the play to showcase a modern take on forbidden love makes the play more accessible and tangible. Romeo and Juliet are no longer star-crossed lovers in a yellowed literature book, but people in our lives.
For Sierra, staging this play was a deeply personal project. She grew up in a small conservative town, where a close friend struggling to come out of the closet ended up committing suicide.
"It's the hardest thing I've ever been through," she said. A lifelong dancer, she saw years later a ballet of "Romeo and Juliet" staged by one of her favorite choreographers that recast the love story between two men. The ballet inspired her to adapt the play's script to a similar theme, and she worked closely with friends in Rude Mechanicals to create her project.
"It's helped me heal," she said. "But it's also so emotional, almost painful to see it become real. This does sort of mean I have to let him go."
Randle said that it was both fulfilling and challenging to work with a director who is so personally connected to the work. He worked with Sierra from the beginning, and has accordingly watched the play evolve from an idea to an actuality.
"I care that Janice gets across what she wants to," he said. He added that he could always read Sierra's emotional response at rehearsal - elation or incredible disappointment - to know whether he hit or missed a performance. It was never just a director going through the motions, but someone nursing an emotional vision to life, he said.
Both the director and cast, however, said that they wanted the homosexual nature of the love story to be secondary to the plot. Indeed, watching the unexpected relationship unfold within the confines of the more traditional play normalizes what society otherwise deems as taboo.
"I want the audience to almost forget that it's a gay relationship," Randle said. "And just look at it as two characters trapped in a vicious cycle."
The play opens this Friday night in Ward 1 and continues with a matinee and evening performance on Saturday. Tickets are $5 at the door.
You can reach this staff writer at agoldstein@theeagleonline.com.
