R + J

Tonight I stayed late at school to see a production of R+J, a version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. It's pretty much the regular play, but it has a frame story around it. A group of students at a prep school are going to perform Romeo and Juliet on the school playground one night, but they can't get any of the girls to play Juliet. A boy volunteers to be Juliet, says he knows all the lines. The boy playing Romeo thinks it over, shrugs and says, "why not?" The rest is the regular play, with the added frisson that Juliet is a guy. It gives the play a new tension.

So there I sat, in my school's auditorium with 200 other parents, teachers and students watching two boys kiss on stage (not for nothing, that's what the Elizabethan audience would have seen, but that's another story for another time). It was exhilarating, taboo and beautiful all at once. I had spent enough years in high school drama productions wanting to kiss the Romeo, looking around the cast for the others like me, that to see male desire, love, and passion displayed on the stage was intense and cathartic. We've come a long way, Virginia Slim, if teen boys can kiss on a stage in front of their mother, Homeroom teacher, and the football team.

I was also struck by the beauty of the language, expressed so naturally by these young actors.:

"Juliet: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

Romeo: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

Juliet: Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

Romeo: O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair." (Act I, Scene V)

sigh. or this one-

"But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she."

That William knew what he was up to, and these kids got it. They played the puns, the playfulness of street insults and bitten thumbs for all they were worth. Sure, they got a little melodramatic in a few death scenes. But isn't that what adolescence is all about?

Two days after CA banned gay marriage, it was a relief to see there are still corners of the country where a boy romeo and boy juliet can meet, fall in love, and marry. Oh, yeah, they die in the end too, but what a way to go.

J