november shakespeare

here are Juliet and Romeo, posed so optimistically together, as if they have been resurrected them from their tombs in Verona and replanted in New York City, just before the turn of the century. a lovely couple, hm? so young. just a bit delusional. completely carefree. utterly doomed.

Brigham Young University staged their Romeo and Juliet in the Gilded Age, swapping Shakespeare's chorus slash narrator for an actual once-living historical figure: Samuel Ward McAllister. this southern gentleman greets us with the traditional prologue to the play--but as things start happening, he pauses to interject all sorts of commentary about what is fashionable and what is not. he's written a book, you see. a collection of memoirs called Society as I Have Found It. snippets from the book were strung together into a little monologue which framed the story of these famous star-crossed lovers.

it's always interesting to see what people do with the notorious timelessness of Shakespeare. a friend Grace, the other day, wrote a bit about how the point of Shakespeare is his language. the words. the poetry. everything else (costumes, setting, actors, props) can be traded or modernized or turned around or painted over. the words make the story. the words pull all these emotions out of us. and really, that's all we've got now. the details of how Shakespeare was performed in the beginning is kind of a matter of speculation now, isn't it?

along with the playbill for this version of Romeo and Juliet, there was an actual study guide for the play (and you can get the PDF here if you like). no doubt some poor fine arts students have been forced to write paragraphs and paragraphs of analysis using this lovely document. lucky them. hopefully they find insightful things to say and interesting ways to say them.

as much as I might wish I were a student in such a class that required such essays, I'm not. so you get this blogpost instead of some well-researched theatre critique. I'll leave you with two very memorable moments from the performance.

first: Mercutio dying, falling suddenly into his friend's arms, ranting bravely as he bleeds to death. Mercutio has always been my favourite for some reason. I was glad to see that in this production his Queen Mab speech was not chiseled away into nothing. yes, it's long... but it's also quite funny. Jason Langlois played an awesome Mercutio and I loved his gold suit and thin little mustache. why does he have to die? it's such bad luck. okay, not really luck--stupidity. and the torture Romeo puts himself through afterwards... it's heartbreaking.

second: Romeo, holding the not-really-dead Juliet in his arms, waxing jealous of death, promising to stay with her 'And never from this palace of dim night / Depart again,' while she, half-recovered from the not-really-poison, stretches and bends her arm, reaching up, barely moving, almost touching him, almost awake...

it was well done, if a bit long. very interesting and every moment beautiful.

{ images borrowed from byuarts.com }