Lantern's "Romeo and Juliet' (2nd review)

Most of us think of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as the world's great love story. Actually, though, the title better goes to Antony and Cleopatra, whose mature lovers are involved in a high-stakes game for power whose complexity is deepened by the wary passion they feel for each other.

By contrast, Romeo and Juliet are a pair of teenagers caught up in a violent adult world they scarcely understand. Their only sure knowledge lies in what they feel for each other, and even that is experienced largely as confusion— the overmastering tide that drags us over the threshold of adulthood. In this case, there's a bear trap at the door.

Charles McMahon's canny and energetic staging of the play— the Lantern Theater's first Romeo— begins with a dumbshow of nighttime Verona. Figures flit in and out of the shadows; muggings and rapes are attempted. This is the world of Renaissance Italy, where anarchy rules as soon as the sun sets, with no more than a semblance of order by day.

Given the Lantern's limited space and resources, there's a considerable doubling of roles. But, as usual, the company turns its challenges to advantage.

One actor, two extremes

This is particularly true of Charlie DelMarcelle, who, playing both the Prince of Verona and Mercutio, represents the play's two social extremes. The Prince is the finger in the dike, whose stern lawgiving is, as he is well aware, capable at best of setting temporary bounds to chaos.

Mercutio, no cutthroat and no villain, is something more dangerous: a hyperactive type who can't live anywhere but on the edge. Nowadays, he'd be diagnosed as bipolar or treated for ADHD. In Shakespeare's day, he would have been classified as choleric. Of course, in the Bard's hands he is simply a thrillingly vital character, but one with doom written all over him.

By assigning both roles to the same actor (and eliciting fine performances for each role), McMahon gets to the core of Shakespeare's perception of the social order as a perpetual contest, and man as a creature at war with himself.

Mercutio and his alter ego, the more contained but no less aggressive Tybalt, act out the enmity of their respective clans. What divides the Capulets and the Montagues? Shakespeare is wisely silent on the question. Hatred, once set on, simply feeds on itself. The clan elders police their turf, and when things get out of hand the magistrate steps in, as the Prince does with his edict at the beginning of the play that the next to shed blood will pay with his life.

Lucky lovers, or unlucky?

This is the world in which Romeo and Juliet are ensnared, and, although as in all of Shakespeare's tragedies the plot turns on circumstance— Romeo's unintended slaying of Tybalt, his premature arrival at Juliet's bier— a profound sense of fatality prevails from the beginning. The kids haven't got a chance, and the sorrowing reconciliation of the clans at the end, quite apart from its hollowness (the Capulets have lost their last child), leaves us with no confidence that things will ever be right in Verona— or anywhere else.

This sacrifice of the innocents would be unbearable but for the momentary splendor of love that Shakespeare accords them. Should we say that Romeo and Juliet would have been luckier never to have met? We can't. They have really had all the luck, brief though it is.

We need to understand that an experience such as theirs can come only at the beginning of life, and although their love is never consummated, in some sense they've already had the best of it: the moment when one discovers the possibility of being completed by another human being.

Teen confusion

Of course the young lovers are as painfully confused as they are delighted, and their situation involves as much wit as wonder. This is a tragedy with many laughs; indeed, a touch of the farcical infuses much of the play until it turns deadly earnest. But for love, Juliet would make a conventional marriage with Paris, her mature and well-born suitor; but for love, Romeo would spend a season or two in exile until the Montagues could sue for his return.

Theirs (and here Shakespeare's genius is at its most acute) is the greater violence, because it refuses any accommodation with the social order that denies it. The lovers would rather die than give each other up: destroy the world rather than be separated by it.

Friar's harebrained scheme

The character of Friar Laurence becomes critical here. The friar's scheme is harebrained, and it backfires terribly. At the same time, though, it puts Juliet's love to the ultimate test, for although she tells us she will kill herself rather than be given to Paris, the vial of poison is her actual moment of truth. The deeper sense that lurks here is that genuine passion ought to risk death as its final proof, and so the friar's folly has a hidden profundity.

His character also suggests the mediating nature of religion. Friar Laurence breaks all the rules to protect the lovers, and at the end, racked by guilt, he submits to what he expects will be a condign punishment. The prince, however, spares him with the line: "We have known thee for a holy man."

The law deals in justice, and even its mercy is severe. The church alone makes room for conscience and grace; that is, for the soul without which the state isn't worth maintaining. The friar's remedy is desperate, but the civil sword has no remedy at all: Even in remitting Romeo's penalty to banishment, the prince has stretched the law as far as he can. The "holy" man must stay, as testament to pity.

Child into woman

Any production of Romeo and Juliet necessarily begins with the lovers, and they are fine here in the persons of Sean Lally and Nicole Erb. She is particularly effective not only in impersonating a child of not-quite 14, but in showing the transition to womanhood that can come, as it almost literally does here, in the blink of an eye. That is the moment that makes her Romeo's equal, and erases the four-year age gap between them.

Lally's Romeo is himself enamored of the world, without fully appreciating its dangers. When, however, he refuses to be baited by Tybalt into a duel, he shows a discretion that more than becomes his years, and we see in him the makings of that rarest of men, a peacemaker. That loss, to Verona itself, is also part of the tragedy.

Jake Blouch does a good Tybalt, and a courtly Paris too. Ceal Phelan is a very affecting Nurse, and comes close to stealing her scenes.

Body language

Frank X, who has memorably played both Othello and King Lear on the Lantern stage, offers a rich characterization of Friar Laurence that humanizes a role too often played as a stiff authority figure. His dragging gait— an inspired physical idea— suggests the mistimed entrance that will ruin his plot. It's a reminder, too, that good acting begins with the legs, and that the way a character moves onstage, even in Shakespeare, is often as important as what he says.

Charles McMahon's direction shows shrewd appreciation of the play's multiple layers of meaning, and the plainspoken declamation of its more lyrical and inevitably familiar lines is effective; this is an American production in the best sense of the word: fresh, brisk and inventive.

Meghan Jones's set, with its large open space, is eminently serviceable, and Shelley Hicklin's lighting captures the play's changing moods without calling undue attention to itself.

Early spring is always the best time to put on Romeo and Juliet, a play about love that, even though doomed, lights the world. This is a version to catch.♦


To read another review by Alaina Mabaso, click here.
To read another review by Jackie Atkins, click here.