Sunday, September 28, 2008

Dude

Or Dudes, I should say, as in, "What is the cast of the Washington D.C. Shakespeare Theatre's production of Romeo and Juliet made up of?" Dudes. All dudes. No women. An all-male cast, ala Elizabethan England. Now look, I understand that this is how they did it in Shakespeare's day - women weren't allowed on the stage. Elizabethan audiences were used to this, it was expected. But we've progressed a bit since then. Women have been playing Juliet, and the Nurse, and the rest of the female roles in Romeo and Juliet for hundreds of years now. And that's what we in the twenty-first century expect. So give it to me. Give me women. An all-male cast in this day and age is a little creepy. Especially when Juliet is played by some six-foot-something guy flapping his arms about like a chicken in order to convey deep emotion. Combine her (him?) with a manic Romeo, racing across the stage in a panic for nearly three hours, and a revisionist production that conveys the first half of the play as near slapstick, and what you've got on your hands is a failure, a flop, and a dud.

Look, there is natural comedy in Romeo and Juliet - the humor of the two over-wrought teenagers in love is written right there on the page and it's an integral part of the play. Romeo's friends, Juliet's nurse, and others make great fun of them. They may seem foolish to us when the play opens but they cannot seem like fools. The two are serious about their love and their love changes them - they find their better selves once they meet, they grow as people. We see it not only in the change in their personalities, but in their language. They begin the play meek, in Juliet's case, and in love with the idea of himself as a lover, in Romeo's case. They are still children and their language reflects that. After they meet, both their personalities and their language change. They grow up right before our eyes. They begin to talk in some of the deepest, most beautifully written language we know. And their love is real. That's part of the tragedy. But the producers of this version of Romeo and Juliet miss all that. They have the idea they can play the two lovers for fools the entire way through the play and still get the payoff of the tragedy at the end, which of course, they can't. They miss the growing up, they pay no attention to the change in the lover's language and personalities. They don't understand the play, or they do and decided that a straight reading of Shakespeare wasn't good enough for them.

More about the all-male cast in this day and age. When I see Juliet, I want her to be young, fresh, and beautiful. I want to fall in love with her. I want to feel about her the way Romeo does the first time her lays eyes on her - "O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night / Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear / Beauty too rich for use / For earth too dear!" I suspect most men feel that way and I suspect most women want to feel the same about Romeo as Juliet does, or want to feel as loved as Juliet is. That's part of the attraction of the play. Put a man in the role of Juliet and that disappears for a lot of us, men and women. The greatest love story ever penned just makes us uncomfortable.

The slappy-happy production also misses out on another vital aspect of the play, its sexual passion and its sheer eroticism. These two kids are hot for each other. The double-entendres and sexual innuendo abound in Romeo and Juliet and we need them to be understood for the play to have its full effect. This production misses it all, or turns eroticism into dirty jokes, like a TV sitcom. When Juliet, in anticipation of making love to Romeo for the first time, says "Give me my Romeo, and when he shall die / Take him and cut him out in little stars / And he will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night / And pay no worship to the garish sun", it should be clear at once that she is not simply signalling Romeo's impending death, but also talking about their sexual coupling. The phrase "to die" in Elizabethan English, meant sexual orgasm. When Juliet says, as she is about to drive the dagger home, "O happy dagger! / This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die", again, she is talking a double language. She is killing herself in grief over Romeo's death, but she is also giving herself to Romeo sexually for eternity - she is the sheath for Romeo's dagger. These should be no need to spell this out in any production of Romeo and Juliet - it should be clear to all, even novices to the play. But in the Shakespeare Theatre's wrong-headed approach to the play, none of this comes through. When the two lovers lay dead on stage at the end, we feel nothing. This is inevitable in a production that plays the two for fools, but the real fools, of course, are the people who produced this travesty.

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