GARRISON, NY – A romance and a love story are two different things. In art, we’re not good at being different.
Take “Romeo and Juliet,” a romantic tragedy full of corpses that is often mistaken for a story of the deepest love, even though the lovers are newly met teenagers – people, even though they are intensely engrossed, will totally puzzle over each other’s likes and dislikes, dreams and histories.
They are passionate, for sure; isn’t everyone that age? But the impulsive young people in “Romeo and Juliet,” both the protagonist and some of their friends, die of their own temper. They weren’t old enough to know it was better to kill each other in a street rage, or agree to a branded scheme that involved faked their own deaths and buried in an actual grave. .
Gaye Taylor Upchurch’s staged – open on Friday nights at Shakespeare Festival in the Hudson ValleyThe new 98-acre riverside estate, under the trees of the familiar shack – presents tragedy as a love story with a twist. Romeo and Juliet are played by festival hosts Kurt Rhoads and Nance Williamson, two actors who have been married for 38 years and have done 68 shows together before. Apparently, the central idea of this production is mistakenly dependent.
“With Kurt and Nance in the title roles,” Upchurch wrote in program notes, using ampersands as her production title, “we must take it for granted that Romeo and Juliet are indeed in love with each other. .”
Even if we could, and I don’t believe we could, that assumption wouldn’t be terribly helpful for a TV series fueled by the urgency of a fresh desire to still be. takes place here with the weariness of long acquaintance, as if guided by Friar Laurence’s advice to “love moderately.” And so the attraction between Romeo and Juliet igniting is not a raging fire but a glowing ember – warmth, not heat.
The fault is not in the casting process is not the same in chronological order; the audience is sophisticated enough not to take their eyes off the actors’ ages. And one summer when Ian McKellen come back again in the lead role in “Hamlet”, which he last play On the stage a year ago, at the age of 82, other seasoned actors might also want to join in interpreting Shakespearean youths.
Elegant interlacing of Upchurch’s ethereal choral music by Heather Christian is one of the most appealing features of this production, along with Enver Chakartash’s eye-catching patterned apparel. But Upchurch didn’t build a framework or find a conceit to support the actor’s age-blindness. Ideas have a forced, non-organic feel – capturing meaning rather than providing it.
Romeo and Juliet, teenagers still under their parents’ roof, take drastic measures to gain control over their lives and futures. But Rhoads and Williamson even had the enthusiasm that imbued these teens with none of the tidal wave emotions that made them ideal enough to defy their family animosity towards each other, and attentive enough not to stop. to think rationally.
Without the recklessness, the despair, the recklessness of the cocktail, their actions would be meaningless. And if we don’t believe in the characters, the play loses its stakes and weight. As when Lady Capulet (Britney Nicole Simpson) adamantly urges nearly 14-year-old Juliet to marry her Parisian suitor, saying, “I’ve been your mother all these years and you’re a maid now.” There’s disruptive potential in that line about girls and the imposed maternity regime, but in the context of this wan production, it merely evaporates.
Paris (Erin Despanie), however, is delightful: unusually likable, and therefore extraordinarily sympathetic. You feel a little bad for the guy as he innocently looks forward to his wedding. And if Kimberly Chatterjee’s fascinating Friar Laurence doesn’t deal with his own goal of honor – ending the antagonism between the Capulets and the Montagues – with his frenzied fake death scheme, he’s still one of the heroes. more fully inhabited objects.
The tent in which all of this is located, with less than chairs for a suite, is a makeshift structure nestled at the foot of a steep hill. It will be replaced nearby by a permanent open-air theater designed by Studio Gang, with views of the Hudson River – the kind of space that festival-goers have enjoyed for decades in their longtime home. Hudson Valley Shakespeare, on the neighboring estate Boscobel House and Gardens.
That backdrop is now gone, but the usual soft sand stage floor remains, for the audience to turn on their way to their seats. Nor does it change comfortably: the clever use of the landscape outside the tent as a play space. After fatally stabbing Romeo’s friend Mercutio (Luis Quintero), Juliet’s cousin Tybalt (Zoë Goslin) runs up the hill, where, in dramatic side light (by Stacey Derosier), he surveys the real remote harm. Upchurch does well with such tableaus.
The Covid-19 cases in the company delayed the opening night of this “Romeo & Juliet”. Even when they arrived, the two actors wore masks on stage. It is not known to what extent the disruption of disease may have disrupted the depth of character in this production.
But more time won’t be able to verify the central elements that refuse to combine: the on-stage fantasy story of Romeo and Juliet’s broken romance, and the behind-the-scenes reality of devoted love of two veteran actors.
Romeo juliet
Through September 18 at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Garrison, NY; hvshakespeare.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.
