My overall impression
I had been jonesing for some good Shakespeare lately, which unfortunately can be considered an oxymoron at times, so when I first heard that a friend of a friend was doing Romeo & Juliet, my ears perked up with excitement. Then I heard him say “gender-reversed” and I sort of tuned out a bit. I thought to myself, “Oh, another let’s screw up Shakespeare by putting it in outer space and in the future and all the monologues are delivered ironically.”
When it comes to Shakespeare, I find that I’m a bit of a traditionalist. The man wrote some really good stuff, there’s no need to fuck with it. Some things are just better the way they were meant to be. But when the fellow actor explained exactly what he meant by “gender-reversed” and that he was playing Juliet, my closed mind, opened up a bit. Having played Juliet in college I learned first hand, it’s Romeo’s play, he gets all the good powerful speeches and moments, where as Juliet’s moments are a lot of re-actions to things that have happened to her, or AT her. So this peeked my interest as a lover of Shakespeare and being one of many actresses that don’t get the same moments in Shakespeare that the male actors get. Now don’t get me wrong just because you CAN do gender-reversed doesn’t mean you should. I got the opportunity to be in an all female cast of Mamets, Glengarry Glen Ross, although I said I’m a traditionalist, I wasn’t going to pass up some of the best speeches written just because I had a vagina. Now our female version was fine, people enjoyed it, but it didn’t pack the same punch. I felt acutely aware that we were saying lines written to be said by men to men. And that is why this gender-reversal of R & J was interesting. All the beauty & the poetry and the intention remained in-tacked. The motivation, the passion, the heartbreak were still very real, no matter which gender said them. Dam that Shakespeare guy was good! But a huge Kudos goes to the cast for selling it! Not just for the absolute commitment & belief in the gender-reversal but to their skill as Shakespearian actors. It was the first time in a long time that I can remember feeling, “Hey these actors REALLY know what they are saying and aren’t just rattling off some semi-rhymey words!” That made the experience so much more enjoyable, I found myself watching with a smile on my face the majority of the time because I was thoroughly immersed in the passion that was driving the play and engaged in the characters that were taking me along with them.And to top it off, they did it all in 90 minutes without an intermission! Obviously a fair amount had to be cut, but take it from someone that knows the play pretty well, I never felt like anything was missing.
So for a production that was performed in such a non-traditional manner, it still held true to everything Shakespeare intended. To engage the audience and bring them along in this beautiful telling of such a lovely and tragic story.
Congratulations to the cast! A job very well done!
