The Wilma Theater presents Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’

I cannot even.

Managing director James Haskins’s curtain speech proudly notes, to righteous applause, that 2,000 high-school students will attend this production. We could debate the intrinsic value of forcing teenagers to experience this play about other teenagers who meet, marry, and quickly die by suicide. But I also wonder if those who know the play will leave this production more confused than those who don’t.

Trimming the play

Dramaturg Walter Bilderback, local singer/songwriter Gracie Martin, Anthony Martinez-Briggs (Mercutio), and director Blanka Zizka are all credited with the script. In subjecting the work to heavy edits, the company didn’t just leave extraneous language on the cutting-room floor. Lord and Lady Montague are gone. Bye, Balthasar. Friar Lawrence (Lindsay Smiling, with an inexplicable Jamaican accent) disappears after Lady Capulet (an icy Suli Holum) and the Nurse (Krista Apple) discover Juliet apparently dead.

Nobody explains why Romeo doesn’t know Juliet is merely unconscious. In this retelling, it appears that Friar Lawrence, after promising Juliet he will send word of their plan to Romeo, just goes about his business until the double suicide.

“Any other part”

Why is still wherefore, while thee and thou are swapped for you. The Nurse’s lines are changed to place Juliet in her late teens rather than age 14, making everything slightly more comfortable for us. The logic behind other textual changes is less clear.

On opening night, when Juliet bemoans Romeo’s name, her reference to “any other part / Belonging to a man” was removed in favor of the double-entendre-free “Be a name of any other man!” But later, Benvolio makes a flamboyant gesture evoking cunnilingus at the Nurse.

Lost intimacy

Taysha Marie Canales’s Juliet gives an anxious, staccato delivery that sounds like she’s doing everything she can to speed things up. Matteo Scammel’s Romeo (in costume designer Vasilija Zivanic’s sneakers, highwater black pants, and baggy white T-shirt) slouches around as though he’d rather be back home in front of a PlayStation 4. He yells at Tybalt (Justin Jain), Benvolio (Kevin Meehan), Friar Lawrence, the apothecary, and Paris with equal vehemence.

Romeo and Juliet meet as the ensemble is kicking it behind them like they’re at the junior prom. Between a giant gold disco ball and live band, the couple’s dialogue, with its heated, cheeky tenderness, gets lost — and so does any real sense of lust or intimacy.

Zizka’s staging, which places many characters at prolonged static distances from each other, further cools the balcony scene (yes, there is a balcony of sorts, after all) into flat, loud slapstick designed to spoon-feed the dialogue to student matinees.

Mercutio and Paris

Martinez-Briggs’s Mercutio riffs during his Queen Mab speech and others (“cruising down the boulevard of broken dreams … from the window to the wall … will you put a ring on it?”) to appreciative snaps from the opening-night audience, but otherwise lacks range.

Matt Donzella distinguishes himself as a Paris with a petty, entitled streak (rather than the handsomely bland presence the character often gets). A kiss he forces on Juliet underscores her revulsion for him, and when he wheels out in a huff on Capulet (a nuanced and assured Steven Rishard), the audience gets a rare inkling of how we go from “my will to her consent is but a part” to a forced wedding, days after a murder in the family.

A glooming peace?

Matt Saunders’s set features moveable curtains of opulent, purple-gold strings that the characters part like doorways. These fly in and out or stack ingeniously, turning solid or transparent by turns under Maria Shaplin’s lights. Some pillows and chairs make up the rest of the furniture.

An onstage band and vocal ensemble of UArts students add original songs courtesy of Martin, ranging from defiant to romantic to dirgelike. They’re a high point of the production, once you get through a determined rock-ballad opener (“I feel like a necrophiliac / I reach for you and you don’t reach back.”)

The Wilma’s production claims “a youthful jolt of energy and activism,” but it’s unclear who these activists are. The last few pages of dialogue are eliminated altogether in favor of the young ensemble gathering over the dead lovers. “Fuck this,” someone says. “I don’t wanna live in the world like this.” Then they all scale the back wall of the set and sing a song — as one does to disrupt the System.

That’s right. No “glooming peace.” I guess that wouldn’t have resonated with the thousands of high-school kids on their way to the Wilma’s matinees.

The Wilma’s Romeo and Juliet run will feature an open captioned performance on Saturday, January 26, at 2pm.