The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Con-con muffs clever ‘Shakespeare’s R & J’
Compelling retelling of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ set at boys Catholic school muddled in Tremont
Shakespeare’s tragic love story “Romeo and Juliet” has proved itself to be a particularly pliable and resilient piece of work.
Its story has, among other things, been retold through dance; by the Royal Ballet; been done as an opera at the Théâtre Lyrique, turned into a musical by Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim (“West Side Story”); and made into movies featuring zombies (“Warm Bodies”), martial artists (“Romeo Must Die”) and CGI garden figurines (“Gnomeo & Juliet”).
Joe Calarco’s abridged reimagining, “Shakespeare’s R & J,” is true to the Elizabethan telling in that it is in play form and features an all-male cast. But it is particularly inspired by a line found in Act 2, Scene 2 of the text: “Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books.” This tale is told by four boys late at night in the dormitory of a repressive Catholic boarding school.
The play, which opened Off-Broadway in 1998 and is being stated by convergence-continuum in Cleveland’s Tremont neighborhood, is grounded in a clever conceit, for the boys are not just reading aloud about infatuation, sexual awakening, forbidden love and star-crossed lovers; they are living it, as one schoolboy (Zach Palumbo, as Romeo) falls for another (Michael Emery Fox, as Juliet), causing tension and anger among their colluding classmates (Joe Soriano, as Mercutio and others, and John P. Cox, as Nurse and others). And, as are Shakespeare’s titular characters, these boys are rebelling against their small-minded culture with the blind passion and giddy enthusiasm of youth.
But this play gets a rather muddled and oftencareless production from con-con under Cory Molner’s direction.
For one thing, three of these four performers (Palumbo is the exception) need to brush up on their Shakespeare, for they — with the added burden of delivering classic text as contemporary teens — give flat and often-empty speed-readings of the dialogue. And, despite some spot-on adolescent behavior at the start of the play and some rough horseplay throughout, they are vague and inconsistent in their schoolboy personas, as well. The boundaries that define the play-within-aplay are never clearly delineated.
To a large extent, this is due to Molner’s direction, which seems to offer little or ill-informed guidance as to just when the boys are to read from the well-worn tome they had hidden under a floorboard, when they are to recite from memory as themselves as if familiar with the text and when they are to be lost in it. When reading from the book, no attention is paid to where. The prologue that sets up the tragedy, the epilogue that tells us that “for never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo” and parts in between seem to be found somewhere in the book’s middle, wherever it happens to open.
Careless is the handling of the boys’ homosexuality. It is unclear in this production whether the young men playing Romeo and Juliet just now realize their feelings for each, which mirrors Shakespeare’s characters, or use this play-acting and their selection of characters as an opportunity or excuse to revisit their shared affections. There is neither discovery, familiarity nor much passion in their kisses to guide our interpretation.
Careless, too, is the handling of the red cloth the boys employ as a prop during their performance, which is intended by the playwright to symbolize death. During the tragic fight between Tybalt and Mercutio and in Romeo’s revenge, it is used in a tug of war in the place of weaponry. When it is used as the bedsheet on Romeo and Juliet’s wedding night, it foretells of the young lovers’ tragic destiny, and it is used to represent the poison that ends their lives. But, in this production, Cox as
Careless is the handling of the boys’ homosexuality.
Nurse also uses it for a character-defining shawl, which seems to miss the point of the prop.
Scott Zolkowski’s scenic design includes a huge stained-glass window on the back wall to help establish the Catholic school setting. And he offers only a vague impression of a dormitory to facilitate the play-withina-play transitions, which are complemented by the haunting thunder, spoken dialogue and disembodied laughter worked into Beau Reinker’s soundscape and the lightning and flashlight beams that are part of Eva Nel Brettrager’s lighting design.
Calarco’s “Shakespeare’s R & J” is an intriguing addition to the Shakespeare-inspired canon.
And its lengthy run OffBroadway suggests that it is a better play than what con-con has put into production.