American Players Theatre's production of Romeo and Juliet directed by John Langs is something other than magical. Before the griefs, a few excellent performers deserve highlighting. Colleen Madden brings warmth and sweetness and when necessary acidity to her role as Juliet's nurse: her first scene with its speech about Susan and the earthquake and her "merry" husband (which Madden decides means the guy was a lush) is heartwarming and you feel confident in the comfort that, if Juliet barely had a mother in Lady Capulet, at least in the Nurse she had a mom. Also, Lindsay Welliver as Friar John stands out: Welliver often serves as verbal American Sign Language interpreter for Friar Laurence (Robert Schleifer), as well as Romeo (Joshua Castille), both characters portrayed by Deaf actors in this production, who communicate through ASL, and whose words are translated by various members of the ensemble throughout the performance. Welliver manages to make her Shakespearean oratory crystal-clear, finding characteristic resonance particularly when translating as John for Laurence, and the way she tears up translating Romeo's pre-wedding speech is everything you want out of an evening with Juliet and her Romeo.
Langs' work with Castille (they collaborated on the adaptation) to place ASL next to Elizabethan verse has nothing to do with the production's numerous weaknesses. Indeed, the most fully-realized elements of the production, such as when Peter (Joshua Krause) struggles to understand Romeo's quips as conveyed through the vocals of Benvolio (Nathan Barlow), or Friar Laurence attempting to use his lecture on herbs to subdue the tempers of violent Capulet and Montague youth, are when the production's point of view shines through most clearly. These moments happen in direct correlation to when it seems the character's Deafness appears to be (and sometimes is) written into the dialogue by the Bard (or by Castille and Langs). But those strengths sadly don't dominate the evening.
To start with the big crime, there's a set-change after Every. Single. Scene. Romeo and Juliet is a play that thrives on pace and rapidity and is about age versus youth and demands verve and passion in every step of its narrative. So, when you have the lights dimming and the theatre-music starting and the actors moving the set-on-wheels to some new configuration every damn time you've basically rendered the play dead-on-arrival. It's hard to get past.
Also, the production suffers from a real lack of memorable characters. Aside from the previously mentioned, you just never feel like you get to know anybody all that well, which is doubly upsetting for how long the production takes (with intermission it's a three-hour-and-ten-minute affair). Certainly actors like Isabelle Bushue as Juliet and Daniel José Molina as Mercutio bring intelligence to their interpretations of Shakespeare's language, but they each suffer under Langs' lack of directorial imagination, together with uniquely unfair burdens placed on those two characters. Juliet is either written-in-light or she is not, and with Langs at the helm Bushue remains earthbound, as this curmudgeonly reviewer can personally point to examples of Juliet's Act 4, Scene 3 soliloquy being more illuminated by actors not fifteen years of age. One wishes the director had taken a greater interest in Shakespeare's most delightful creation. Molina gives a Mercutio that likely would have killed in say 2006, but more and more in our current era finding the dazzling life-force behind the ribald jokes that feel more predatory with each passing year is a real hurdle for Mercutios to overcome, and Langs' production is not up to the task, as it seems unsure whether we should find such crotch-indicating and body-shaming openly funny or actually disquieting or some combo of the two.
The rule is a reviewer should never attempt to offer advice to the artists he's criticizing. I believe that to be true, and am about to ignore it. Skip the next paragraph if you're not in the mood.
Don't apologize for the characters' misogyny. Don't try and pretend Verona isn't a harsh place tyrannically indebted to gender norms. Don't give us four people fighting with swords and hope we feel a community in peril. Don't try and soften Capulet's outburst when actually the meaner he is the more we feel his tenuous connection to the empire he's built for his daughter. Don't cut the lamentations of grief for the seemingly-dead Juliet and still expect us to feel badly for her family.
By this point, hopefully it's clear my beef is with Langs, and not any individual actor or their personal talent. Romeo and Juliet is about what happens when the older generation fails the younger, though you'd never know that from Langs' production. Langs' 2013 Hamlet with Matt Schwader in the title-role played like a hyper-eloquent, high-speed thriller, and remains as fine a Danish tragedy as I've ever seen. His productions of Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! and Long Day's Journey Into Night are a major part of why O'Neill is my favorite American playwright, as I've never seen a director more capable of tuning into the dead Irish-American scribe's literary cadences and writerly dialogue. The man is clearly an excellent director, it's just a shame that's not on display in Romeo and Juliet.
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