Lantern's 'Romeo and Juliet' (1st review)

How old were Romeo and Juliet when they first met?

According to Shakespeare's text, Juliet was weaned 11 years earlier, and two more summers "must wither in their pride" before she turns (almost) 16. In fact, Juliet compares herself to a little girl: "So tedious is this day/ As is the night before some festival/ To an impatient child that hath new robes and may not wear them."

Romeo, similarly, upon wrenching himself from Juliet's balcony, intones, "Love goes toward love, as schoolboys from their books;/ But love from love, toward school with heavy looks."

Yet nowadays, Juliet too often becomes a willowy, clear-eyed 20-something and her mother— who's supposed to have given birth to Juliet as a teenager herself ("I was your mother much upon these years/That you are now a maid")— becomes a middle-aged dame.

In the Lantern's first production of Romeo and Juliet, director Charles McMahon provides a refreshing exception: He presents Shakespeare's story exactly as it ought to be— as the meeting, wooing and untimely death of two impulsive teenagers.

"If they're not young, they're crazy." McMahon remarked to me after the performance. " And if they're crazy, you don't care about them."

Tush-slapping

Thus we readily believe that a pettish, quavering Romeo (Sean Lally) has been up all night mooning. The ensuing action almost seems giddy, springing from Romeo's apparent lack of sleep as much as anything else: Romeo's companions Benvolio (Kevin Meehan) and Mercutio (Charlie DelMarcelle) join in much chortling and companionable tush-slapping.

Appropriately, Lally and Nicole Erb as Juliet pour their heat into an intense physical connection rather than imbuing the dialogue with heartfelt romance. Lines that other productions usually lavish with weighty, sincere soliloquy are here giggled irreverently or delivered cavalierly to a nearby audience member.

This accent on the lovers' youth and folly (as opposed to any profound love) gives shape and weight to elements of the play that are often overlooked. This performance, unburdened by attempts to make R & J's connection more mature than it actually is, leaves a lingering realization of just how wildly the play's language swings from the rosy to the utterly macabre— much like teenagers themselves. Between the constant premonitions of death, the rampant threats of suicide and Juliet's fear of waking in the crypt, R & J really does contain just as many gruesome lines as love-struck ones, and McMahon doesn't hesitate to give them equal play.

McMahon's choices didn't blunt the emotional impact of the star-crossed lovers' death: The woman sitting behind me sobbed openly from the time Juliet was carried into the crypt, and a chorus of sniffs accompanied the final tableau.

Nine actors = a city

Under McMahon's expert direction, an ensemble of just nine actors feels like a whole city in the opening scene as they scurry in and out of every corner of the set, rolling back and forth across the stage like marbles in a hand-held box. Before we know it, three civil brawls have broken out.

Nicole Erb is a pitch-perfect Juliet, radiating a plump, naÓ¯ve prettiness as well as a brash sensuality. Leonard C. Haas's genial, expansive start as Lord Capulet renders the shocking meanness of his later scene with Juliet (cruel enough to crack the ice of the lovely K. O. DelMarcelle as Lady Capulet) almost as untoward as the young lovers' marriage.

As Friar Laurence, Frank X brings exasperation, humor and palpable moral qualms to a role often reduced to a plot device. The teens' evident lust drives Laurence to chide, "You shall not stay alone/ Till holy church incorporate two in one"; and later, Laurence's guilty anguish at Juliet's demise drives home the fact that even after Romeo's suicide, Laurence should have chaperoned her instead of running out of the room.

Other unexpected joys include Ceal Phelan as a maddeningly loveable nurse and Jake Blouch, who goes effortlessly from Tybalt to Paris to a hilarious, hapless manservant.

Up from minimalism

Set designer Meghan Jones provides a much more full-bodied, traditional look than the monochromatic, minimalist offerings of the Lantern's annual Shakespeare in recent years. Ivy branches wind decorously across warm stone walls and arched doorways, and costume designer Mary Folino provides perfectly structured Elizabethan garb.

My own date certainly caught the adolescent spirit of the evening. When Juliet insisted to the departing Romeo, "I must hear from thee every day in the hour," my husband whispered, "She just invented Facebook."♦


To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read another review by Jackie Atkins, click here.