Curio Theatre’s lesbian ‘Romeo and Juliet’

“Typical shallow liberal tripe,” the rant went on. “Personally, I’m a fan of Shakespeare’s work and would only be interested in seeing a faithful rendition of his plays.”

At a talkback after one of the performances last week at the Calvary Center for Culture and Community, formerly a church (oh, take us now, Satan!), director Krista Apple-Hodge noted that Curio has “managed to anger both the Shakespeare purists and the marriage purists.”

But as one of her cast members piped up, what “faithful” performance are the purists demanding? A tragic love story performed by a man and a 13-year-old boy, as Shakespeare originally intended?

“Everyone producing Shakespeare in this day and age is adapting Shakespeare somehow,” Apple-Hodge noted.

Jeans and tank tops

Rachel Gluck, who plays Romeo here as a lesbian woman, explained Curio’s approach to the switch in last week’s talkback. “We didn’t want the relationship between Romeo and Juliet to be totally gendered,” she said. The director and performers didn’t intend for Romeo to be a butch lover to a lady-like Juliet (a crystalline Isa St. Clair).

The art on the playbill cover shows two women holding hands in identical long dresses— a look that’s definitely not borne out in the production’s styling. Aetna Gallagher’s costumes put Juliet in bridal white throughout the show, from a delicate little dress at the start to a brilliant pair of skinny jeans to her silky death shroud.

But Romeo spends the play in tight black pants, hefty boots and a wife-beater tank top, her brown bob haircut offering quite a contrast to Juliet’s flowing ringlets. I wondered how much more challenging and supposedly non-gendered the production could have been if Romeo, too, wore a dress.

An effeminate Romeo?

That tension around just how much of a gender overhaul the play has undergone grips the experienced theatergoer throughout the performance. Pronouns get a swap, of course, but not all the lines are so easily remade.

Many lines are adjusted to fit the same-sex marriage without too much trouble. “There stays your love to make you a wife,” the Nurse tells Juliet. Later, lamenting Tybalt’s doom, Juliet says, “Shall I speak ill of her to whom I’m married?”

Other lines, left alone, evoke a traditionally gendered relationship. On the balcony, Juliet still says, “Be but sworn my love,/And I'll no longer be a Capulet.” Later, she still muses that she is “sold, not yet enjoyed.”

At Mercutio’s fatal fray, Gluck as Romeo cries that Juliet’s beauty “hath made me effeminate,” as if she needs and prefers a masculine bent.

At other times, Romeo makes “a gentleman-like offer” and is still a “master” to her servant. To me, the inconsistent adaptation of the language was more distracting than Romeo's conception as a woman.

Juliet takes charge

My favorite part of the gender swap came in the balcony scene. Watching the dialogue between two women, instead of a man and a woman, suddenly made me realize that Juliet has as much to say here as Romeo does, despite the fact that Romeo is supposedly the one doing the wooing.

Juliet doesn’t need any convincing— she offers to be perverse merely as a sop to any pride Romeo stakes on winning her over, instead of finding her with arms already open. So who’s wooing whom? The balcony scene as originally written, in Hodge-Apple’s hands, does sound like a meeting of two souls where gender is irrelevant.

In addition to many other cuts and changes, including an emulsion of Lord and Lady Capulet (played by Gallagher), this may be the first time— for a few hundred years at least— that the Nurse and Tybalt are played by the same person. Colleen Hughes, in her amazing double turn, is the “Princess of Cats.”

Krista-Apple also double-casts Harry Slack as both Paris and the Prince, so it’s no problem just to cut Paris’s murder at the bier. Right?

“You don’t miss anything,” Apple-Hodge said of these changes at the talkback. No doubt all directors say the same as they reshape the plays for modern audiences. The Bard isn’t around to contradict them.

Hamlet’s new choices

Apple-Hodge probably dwells in the same creative camp as Quintessence Theatre Group’s young artistic director, Alexander Burns. When I interviewed Burns recently about his much-whittled-down Hamlet (playing at Mount Airy’s Sedgwick Theater through Nov. 23), he assured me that his cuts focus on the play’s highlights without altering the story.

Burns sees no reason to keep Hamlet’s gloriously ghoulish and portentous opening scene, where the ghostly king appears to the watchmen. Instead, Burns opens the play with the royals sitting around a table and talking— a static choice, to my mind, compared to the playwright’s intent.

Whether or not we’re really missing anything— a ghost, a killing, a Capulet father, a male Romeo—is up to each audience member to decide. Ignore the hateful naysayers. Despite some bumps in the adaptation, Curio’s exciting take on the classic text is worth seeing for yourself.