"Romeo and Juliet" production not your usual Shakespearean yawn

It may be safe to say that over the past 400 or so years, many of William Shakespeare’s classic plays have been performed thousands and thousands of times. I remember having to read them throughout high school. Our teacher would assign the parts and we’d force our way through every line having no clue as to what anything we were saying actually meant. We’d stay seated and hovered over the book. Never did we get up and perform the story and even if we did, our terrible acting, low energy and lack of understanding the language would have been an insult to Shakespeare’s hard work.

That’s the image that pops into my head when I think of a Shakespeare play: a classroom of uninterested teenagers slightly strangling the English language with misplaced emphases and improper dialect and barely making sense of what is going on in the story. This is probably why I have never EVER EVER cared to see a live performance of any Shakespearian play. They have been performed, retold, butchered, alluded to and quoted time and time again. Why would anyone want to hear the same stories again and again?

Ironically, until last weekend, I had never seen a Shakespearian play performed live before. My judgment had been based on a few experiences in high school English classes. Having heard so much about the What You Will Shakespeare Company, a campus theater group that performs and revisions many of Shakespeare’s plays, I decided to check out their latest performance of “Romeo and Juliet.” Kudos to the troupe for having changed my perception.

Coming into to this, I pictured a retelling of the classic tragedy of two star-crossed lovers, possibly set in modern times. Posters for the show featured a modern-day couple and a masked gentlemen amidst burning flames. One of the males, who I assumed was Romeo, embraced the female (Juliet). His ponytail and hidden face made his sex questionable. So, I really did not know what to expect from this show. Two minutes into it, however, it was clear that the show was indeed, word from word, a traditional telling of Shakespeare’s classic.

‘Oh boy,’ I thought. I did not want sit in Gregory Hall for two and half hours watching a traditional presentation of Romeo and Juliet. After a while, though, I found myself really getting into it. Mercutio made me laugh, Romeo made me think and Juliet’s naiveté seemed to dance around just as much as Juliet did after having met Romeo for the first time at the Capulet ball. This is why the story is told and retold, because it is an amazing tale, one that is not fully appreciated until you have seen it performed live on stage the way it was meant to be shown. The show demonstrated why we’d spend weeks, even months at a time, in high school forcing ourselves to read Shakespeare’s work. Maybe being older and more mature, I understand/appreciate Shakespeare’s intention. Or, maybe it was simply What You Will’s clever handling of it.

While this version stayed true to the original play in terms of story, language and characters, there were a few subtleties that were added to enhance the tale’s flavor. The implicit elements and themes that we used to simply discuss in high school were made more explicit in this performance. The story’s irony was displayed through color. The Capulets all wore red and the Montague’s wore blue. Accordingly, Juliet’s sleeping potion was blue and Romeo’s death poison was red. The play’s death toll was marked by red and blue ribbons (depending on who died, a Capulet or Montague) demonstrating the irony in both houses losing the same number of people. Those characters that were directly involved in Romeo and Juliet’s deaths (Friar Laurence, Apothecary, Peter, Balthasar) were played by the same three actors. The three actors formed a collective character known as Fate (I know, smart, right?). The performance was simply clever and intelligent.

My first experience with the What You Will Shakespeare Company was a pretty good one. I’ll give live, traditional Shakespeare another chance now. The group, however, is known for stepping outside of that box, so I’d be interested in seeing more experimental versions of Shakespeare’s classics.

What You Will’s next performance is Love’s Labour’s Lost. It will be shown December 4th and 5th. We’ll see what What You Will does with that one.