|
on NSU Theatre presentation of Shakespeare's R&J A New Version of Romeo and Juliet Adapted by Joe Calarco |
|
|
on NSU Theatre presentation of Shakespeare's R&J A New Version of Romeo and Juliet Adapted by Joe Calarco |
Joe Calarco is a resident director and playwright at the Expanded Arts Theatre Company on New York's lower East Side. A recipient of a Drama League Directing Fellowship, Joe is a graduate of Ithaca College. He's currently writing a full-length play, In the Absence of Spring, and has recently completed a screenplay for a planned film of Shakespeare's R&J.
Joe Calarco's adaptation of Romeo and Juliet is all about discovery, a way to discover how the themes of Shakespeare's play provide a means by which the four Catholic schoolboys (that comprise the entire cast of players) can explore their own experiences as part of the growing up process. For the audience, it gives them the chance to discovery aspects of the play that may never have occurred to them before.
The author calls Romeo and Juliet "a fierce, dangerous tragedy about sex. Death, lust, violence, betrayal murder and teen suicide." He adds that in adapting the play "there were many bad ways it could go... How could I have it make sense, instead of doing it just to be trendy? If there's one thing I hate, it's a concept show with no reason for a concept."
He doesn't claim credit for the initial idea of using men in women's roles, for that was a concept he inherited from the artistic director of the Expanded Arts Theatre Company (where R&J was first produced) who was interested in was seeing how a cast of men changed all of Shakespeare's double-entendres. After taking over the show, Calarco discovered that "with all men in the cast, it became much clearer how strong the women were."
Joe Calarco had never seen an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet that he liked feeling that "it's always so sweet. I want to strangle Juliet. There's never any danger, there's no sex. Today we look at teen-age couple in headlines and we think they're insane. Then we look at Romeo and Juliet and think, 'how sweet.' No, they're insane!" Calarco adds that this is no "sweet romance... the lovers are nuts.... when Romeo says, 'Come death, and welcome, Juliet wills it so,' that's insane... This is not Hamlet- there's no reflection; it's all blind action, blind passion."
There were many places he thought of using to set the play, places where one would normally expect to find a population of young men- a schools, a prison, the military- and settled on a Catholic boys' school. Although not Catholic himself, Calarco had many relations that were, and he responded immediately to the "wonderful theatricality" of Catholicism. That R&J turned out to be even more radical than he initially planned was a bit of a surprise to him, with the four schoolboys finally discovering themselves through Shakespeare even as they play the action of the story. "I knew we could do whatever we wanted, because everybody knows the story."
His next inspiration came from two films, Heavenly Creatures and The Crucible. In the first film, Kate Winslet's performance of a Juliet (within the story) who is "out of her mind, vivacious, voracious" caused him to look at his Juliet in a different way. The character in the film "isn't innocent at all, she knows what she wants and she goes for it." The recent film version of Arthur Miller's The Crucible began with an added opening sequence, not found in the original play, in which the slave Tituba sets off mass hysteria in Salem by displaying her magic powers. With its "mix of eroticism and terror, the hysteria born of oppression," Calarco believed that his interpretation could work.
Finally, he added two different passages from A Midsummer's Night Dream that evoke the world of magic, as well as some very prim advice from a 19th century etiquette manual entitled simply The American Code of Manners. He did cut Shakespeare heavily, feeling that Romeo and Juliet's professions of love seemed a little "melodramatic- over the top," but added two Shakespeare sonnets and a wedding scene since "Shakespeare never lets you see the lovers getting married." He notes, however, that whatever "you cut, you're cutting gorgeous language."
For the four men who would be called on to play men and women, it raised two important questions: how to play a woman, what it means to be a man. "Gender issues weren't much discussed," but the furies that actresses such as Glenn Close and Jessica Lange must mute in order to communicate in a male-dominated world were.
So, then "the world of R&J is a world full of danger...put (four) schoolboys in a school where Catholicism reigns, patriarchy rules, and where simply reading Shakespeare is forbidden, and you have a world pulsating with repressed hysteria... I wanted to make the play dangerous, to be about the forbidden." But he adds, "just because Shakespeare understands the human condition, it doesn't mean it can't be a good time."
The cast members playing the students for Northern State University Theatre's production of Shakespeare's R&J are Seth Engel, Gregory Parmeter, Tony L. Kollman and Spencer Dockery. NSU's Director of Theatre, Daniel Yurgaitis, will direct it. The play, which is receiving its South Dakota premiere, will be performed onstage at the Johnson Fine Arts Center in the round. Performances are scheduled for Wednesday through Saturday, February 20-23, at 7:30 pm. Tickets are $8.00, with discounts available for seniors and students. Tickets go on sale Monday. February 11 in the NSU Bookstore. For additional information, call 626-2563.
To celebrate the performances of this play, NSU Theatre, supported by a grant from the South Dakota Humanities Council, is presenting noted Shakespearean author and scholar, Dr. Mary Z. Maher, in a series of public presentations and discussions. There are a number of events on campus and off, all of which are free and open to the public. Here is the schedule and location of events:
Mary Z. Maher (BA, MA, University of Iowa: PhD., University of Michigan) is a Professor Emerita of theatre arts from the University of Arizona. She has attended the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, England, and has been awarded grants three times from the National Endowment for the Humanities to attend institutes at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. She has given workshops on acting Shakespeare in England and the United States and is active in the Shakespeare Association of America and the International Shakespeare Association of America. She has published upwards of 40 articles in Shakespeare Quarterly and other journals, which featured her research BBC, where she worked on "The Shakespeare Plays" series. Her book, Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies, uses interview material from modern actors of the role including Ben Kingsley, Derek Jacobi, David Warner, John Gielgud and Kevin Kline, and was completed on a senior fellowship from the American Association of University Women. The book is about to be reissued with additional interviews from Kenneth Branaugh and Simon Russell Beale.
She served as Visiting Distinguished Professor at Arizona State University at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. She juries on the American Fellowship Board for the American Association of University Women and also for the Javits Foundation in the US Department of Education. She has a biography of Nicholas Pennell circulating to publishers, which has been supported by a grant from the Canadian Embassy and also a residency at the Centro Studi, Fondazione Bogliosco, in Italy.
Recent publications include a chapter entitled "A Midsummer Night's Dream: Nightmare or Gentle Snooze?" in A Midsummer Night's Dream, ed. Dorothea Kehler, Garland Press, 1977; a chapter entitled "A Graduate Course in Shakespeare in Production" in Teaching Shakespeare into the 21st Century, ed. Salomone and Davis, and an essay entitled "'Neither a Borrower Nor a Lender Be': Zeffirelli's Hamlet" in Shakespeare Yearbook VII. Mahler's latest articles have been focused on teaching Shakespeare and related pedagogical studies although she retains her sub-specialty in Shakespeare on film. She is at work on a third book entitled Performing Shakespeare: Classical Actors Speak, which features interviews from Kevin Kline, Zoë Caldwell, Judi Dench, Derek Jacobi, Tony Church, William Hutt, Nicholas Pennell and other.