A walking tour through the Bard's star-crossed tale

COURTESY JULIA TIERNAN/YH Shakespearean clown Rachel Levy, Sm '00 (left), with Shannon Morrison, Tc '00, (right) demonstrates a different way to sweep you off your feet.

As the Prince of Verona stares upon the carnage at the end of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, he urges the characters who have survived to "go hence to have more talk of these sad things." In viewing this production of the play, we can imagine what followers of the Prince's request might say. They would tell the tale of Romeo and Juliet, young lovers torn apart by their families' hatred for one another. They would tell of friends and cousins deaf to calls for peace, of a father insensitive to his daughter's choice for a husband, and of a well-meaning friar blind to the consequences of his interference with the lives of two lovers. And when asked why Romeo, Juliet, and three others had to die, these faithful would cite poor choices, a string of bad luck, and the familial discord between Juliet's Capulets and Romeo's Montagues. In other words, they would use the most obvious explanations.

An explanation's apparent simplicity should not be basis for its rejection. After all, Shakespeare made a family feud, an abusive father, and a fateful string of circumstances central to the plot Romeo and Juliet. These are the most familiar elements of the play, the ones most of us have heard since our first exposure to the star-crossed lovers in eighth-grade English class. Upon these supports, Franco Zeffirelli built his gorgeous, faithful, and sexually-charged film interpretation of the play in 1968. From these basics came the wildly imaginative interpretations of Robert Wise's West Side Story, Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and John Madden's recent Oscar winner Shakespeare in Love. It is with these simple elements in mind that producer Mali Locke and director Luca Borghese, ES '00, have attempted to recreate this classic here at Yale.

The newest interpretation begins with the setting, or "atmosphere," as play tour guide Samantha Lazarus, BK '02, calls it. Forgoing the scene changes of a traditional stage, Borghese's Romeo and Juliet leads the audience through various spots in and out of the Slifka Center. The play's first scene opens with clowns Trevor Hawkins, DC '99, and a very funny Rachel Levy SM '00, bantering and roughhousing outside on Wall St., pausing occasionally for passing cars. The play continues through back alleys and the Slifka Center patio, coming inside for the Capulet party scene and those within the Friar's and Juliet's chambers. While the tour guide, Benvolio (Elisabeth Waterston, DC '99), and other characters may expose their legs and arms, I would suggest you do not. Over half of the play requires the audience to stand outside, so a jacket, pants, and comfortable shoes will come in handy.

The experience is hardly enjoyable, and cars and pass-ers-by prove a serious distraction, but the walking play lends an intimacy that might be lost on a larger, immobile stage. The audience's proximity to the characters incorporates them into the play, and at one point, during the scene at Capulet's party, the cast even picks certain spectators with whom to dance and mingle. Once sitting inside, away from the bawdiness of earlier scenes, this intimacy proves a crucial selling point for the play. We see Juliet (Kim-Thu Posnett, MC '99) struggle to cope with the death of her cousin, Tybalt (the strong Nate Shenkkan, BR '02), and the status of Romeo (Ryan Karels, BR '00) as his killer. After Romeo's banishment from Verona, we hear loud knocking on the door and actually feel the panic of discovery.

In these moments, the device of a walking play gives Romeo and Juliet an urgent, immediate feel. We aren't just watching the play, we are a part of it, as invested in the characters as if we had known them. These moments, however, come rarely. For the most part, the device slips into one-dimensionality. While the interpretation makes the play as bawdy and comedic as both the Bard and Elizabethan audiences would have liked, it also loses the tragedy and urgent romantic connection central to the play.

The cast, while capable of a silly comedic effort, seems to have the odd notion that loudness is akin to expressiveness. Posnett's shrill indignation only occasionally slips into tenderness and self-reflection and Karels' delivery, while nuanced and expressive, is too self-satisfied to promote much sympathy. The two leads flirt playfully back and forth but never seem to connect on a romantic level, and therefore never become convincing enough to warrant their desperate suicides.

The strongest performances instead come from supporting players. J.J. Lind is loud, abrasive, and over-the-top, yet utterly convincing as the drunken and manic Mer-cutio. Desirée Burch, TD '01, lends the nurse a humanity that brings out Posnett's best performances. And Dan-iel Larlham, SM '00, as the blind Friar Lawrence pulls off the best performance in the play, giving his character stunning warmth and vulnerability.

In any other production, the strength of so many great supporting performances might have carried the show, but this is Romeo and Juliet, and the lead performances make or break the play. Without a romantic connection between the leads, the rest of the play seems meaningless. The play is about more than just family feuds and teenage mistakes. Romeo and Juliet is the cry of youth for attention, but in Borghese's version, the lead actors move their mouths without saying a thing.

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