Romeo and Juliet
By William Shakespeare. Directed by Ryan McGee. Set by Kathy Bencowitz. Costumes by Abigail Joseph. Lighting by Dave Corlette. Sound by Mike Simonetti. With Graham Sack, Anne Jump, Jay Chaffin, Lisa Faiman, Daniel Cozzens, Rachel Eisenhaure, Caitlin Butler, Joseph Gfaller, Matthew Thompson, Nick Meunier, Kim Ravener, and Jeremy Funke. Original music by Andy Boroson. Presented by the Harvard Radcliffe Summer Theatre at the Loeb Experimental Theatre through August 16.

For all that it’s one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, Romeo and Juliet doesn’t turn up often in these parts — the last six years have seen just the Commonwealth and Trinity stagings in 1997 and a Wheelock Family Theatre production in 1995. True, it’s the stuff of high-school English classes and drama clubs, but this romantic warhorse is nothing to bite your thumb at. It’s a challenge to Elizabethan citizen comedy, with Shakespeare taking up the question (he’d address it again in The Merry Wives of Windsor) of a father’s right to bestow his daughter’s hand, a hot topic in 1590s London. It’s a tragic tale about " star-crossed lovers " — but do Romeo and Juliet really care for each other, or are they just looking for reflections of themselves? And could the way the witty Mercutio dies in an ugly, brutish brawl have failed to remind playgoers of Christopher Marlowe’s death just a couple years earlier? So I was a tad dismayed to see the Harvard Radcliffe Summer Theatre advertising " a new interpretation of the play " in which " new alliances are formed, old friendships are betrayed, and a surprising figure becomes the central villain. " Why pick on poor Friar Laurence (you know that’s who they mean), " who hath still been tried a holy man " and is a role Shakespeare himself probably took?

It’s not your basic Bard. Kathy Bencowitz’s set looks like the docks at Stepney, or perhaps backstage at the Globe, and the opening scene has three figures in plain white commedia masks dragging a young man onto a chair and plopping a similar mask on his face. Romeo and Juliet, meet Rebel Without a Cause: the masks are the corporate-suit grown-ups, and the kids aren’t about to trust anyone over 30. That would include Friar Laurence, who it turns out has had a love of his own; his spectral " Lady in Black " keeps looming, and eventually it’s intimated that the Montague-Capulet feud was responsible for her death. Romeo’s reproof " Thou canst not speak of that thou dost not feel " sends the good friar over the edge: he tears up the letter that was to tell Romeo that Juliet is not dead, he becomes the apothecary who sells Romeo the poison, and at the end he lies to the Prince about his role. Lord Capulet, meanwhile, is taking payola from Paris to make the worthy count Juliet’s designated suitor. At the end, after an insincere handshake between the heads of house, the guns come out again and it’s back to square one.

Which is too bad, because there’s some imaginative staging and well-spoken acting on offer. The principals are a little pallid and over-earnest, Graham Sack a very callow Romeo, Anne Jump an awkward, moody Juliet (hard not to wish for the effervescence of Lyric Benson as Julia in the Two Gentlemen of Verona that the Commonwealth Shakespeare’s Young Company presented last week on the Common). Lisa Faiman’s Mercutio is over the top (half as much would be twice as good), and whether she’s supposed to be playing a man or a woman (at the ball she looks daggers at Juliet) is one of this production’s little mysteries, but she sure can handle the verse. Ditto for Rachel Eisenhaure’s scenery-chewing Nurse: when you can act, why overact? Daniel Cozzens is a better than average Benvolio; Matthew Thompson’s one-dimensional Tybalt nonetheless conveys the violence of Elizabethan life as few Tybalts do; Jay Chaffin elicits audience sympathy even as he sells out Friar Laurence. And the Lady in Black’s big entrance is worthy of Fellini.

But it still reads like Shakespeare as done by the punk version of Saved by the Bell. The kids here make the Jets and the Sharks look like Rhodes Scholars. (In the Capulet tomb, Romeo writes three " letters " to his folks: " Hi Mom, " " Hi Dad, " and " Bye. " ) And director Ryan McGee’s generation-gap concept is as corrupt as his Lord Capulet. Just about every Shakespeare production cuts, but this one edits: the lines where, at the ball, Lord Capulet acknowledges Romeo to be " a virtuous and well-governed youth " disappear, and so does all of 5.2, where Friar Laurence learns that the letter he did indeed dispatch to Romeo never made it to Mantua. This isn’t interpreting; it’s rewriting. Apparently the HRST folks figured they could improve on the Bard. Guess again.

Issue Date: August 9 - 16, 2001