by Jeff Grygny
Near the end of Milwaukee Rep’s extraordinary new production of Romeo and Juliet there’s a moment that focuses all its force in one wordless image.
WARNING: 400 YEAR-OLD SPOILERS FOLLOW
Romeo, played by Kenneth Hamilton, is returning to his home town of Verona, where he faces a death sentence because of his part in a deadly street fight. He’s heard that Juliet has taken her own life. He’s given away all his gold and purchased poison from a dodgy apothecary, and he intends to break into Juliet’s tomb and join her in death. Hamilton, approaching the stage down one of the aisles, turns and looks back. His eyes tell it all: inconsolable grief, bitter despair, and above all, hatred for the world that brought him to this. It’s a hatred that destroys the soul, even as the spirit burns. The last 20 minutes of the play are postscript.
Playing in the 50 year old modernist elegance of Vogel Hall, with a single set on a proscenium stage, this production feels almost quaint in style. But in the execution, it’s fresh and bracing as your morning coffee. The direction is strong and the performers flesh the antique characters into real people. This is the finest Romeo and Juliet Milwaukee has seen in years—and the buzz among the opening night audience seemed to recognize it.
Love, hate, family: it’s the most famous of all Shakespeare’s plays; scholars say he was still polishing it near the end of his career. It holds some of the most famous lines in the English tongue, and the most amazing poetry, even crusted over by the centuries into cliché. The story could take place anywhere—well, anywhere young men fight vicious clan wars, and fathers regard their daughters as property. So, a lot of places. The challenge for any director is to grind off the sediment and reveal the beating heart of the tragedy, and this Director Laura Braza accomplishes handily, with the help of incredible music, played live by the performers under Music Director Dan Kazemi. Like their work in Much Ado About Nothing last year, they’ve cracked the Shakespeare code by deploying songs precisely calibrated to the setting to breathe life into the old theater warhorse.
This production is set in Appalachia, land of the Hatfields and McCoys, of feudal politics and family dynamics. The folk songs, with their metal strings and yearning voices, sing of hot days, lush woods, hard labor, and strong passions. The exact period is somewhat vague. It could be the late 1800s, but some artifacts and costumes suggest the present day. Let’s call it mythic Appalachia, somewhere between the civil war and Hillbilly Elegy. It can seem jarring to hear these rustic folks toss off classical references like Oxford scholars, but remember: for a long time the most popular literature in America was Shakespeare and the Bible. They would be no strangers to high-flown rhetoric. Not to mention that some scholars argue that Elizabethan English may have sounded with the soft vowels of the southern drawl. Shakespeare’s lines pour like moonshine through the West Virginia twang.
In the first half of the play, Braza and Kazemi bring gorgeous music to evoke the emotional world of the play. The opening song is a ballad about meeting a woman’s ghost, that might have been transplanted from the Scottish moors. In this version, Romeo first sees Juliet while she’s singing a song at her father’s party. And there’s a lovely handfasting ceremony that might bring a few tears to your eyes. In her debut professional role, Piper Jean Baily shows us the teenaged Juliet as a lively, witty and perhaps over-imaginative girl, her gangly youth accentuated by Mieka van der Plong’s costumes. She and her Romeo have wonderful chemistry; you actually believe that they are made for each other. Harrison plays the consummate romantic, with a physique that might remind folks of a certain age of Al Capp’s Li’l Abner.
But we’re far from “The Dukes of Hazzard do Shakespeare” territory. Matt Daniels gives his all playing Lord Capulet as the bigger than life paterfamilias of a wealthy family. He’s the kind of voluble bearded guy you might find on a Kentucky road behind the wheel of his Silverado; genial when he’s pleased, terrifying when he’s crossed. Alex Keiper confidently straddles the choice role of Juliet’s nurse, betimes no-bull or full of dishy gossip. The show’s superpower is Chicago actor Matthew C. Yee’s Mercutio: a powerful, defining presence. His self-accompanied songs deliver dirt, sweat and savvy in a voice like Kentucky bourbon; his delivery of the famous Queen Mab speech is a genre unto itself: a man who can’t stop his imagination from running out of his mouth in escalating crescendos of fantasy. (It’s now one of my two favorite Mercutios, the other being 50 years ago: a hyperactive high school student, with a 15 year old Mark Waters, aka Sir Mark Rylance, playing Romeo.) Yee later beefs up a comic scene with a positively filthy ballad with innuendo so coarse it barely escapes being pornography. Also excellent is Nate Burger’s transformation into Friar Lawrence, a country parson-slash-herbalist, played with with gruff tenderness.
Braza evidently chose to make all the music diegetic, so there’s no music in the Capulet family tomb, where the two bright kids meet their terrible, stupid denouement. Whether or not this gives the scene more emotional power is up to the viewer to decide. There’s just perfect final reprise of the opening song. (Note to the producers: it would be nice to have a list of the songs with a bit of their provenance in the program.)
Clan wars seem to have always been part of the human condition, though nowadays they’re likely to be more based on ideological affinities than blood ties. And in her classic book The Creation of Patriarchy, historian Gerda Lerner detailed how the cultural norm of men regarding women as property was a millennium-long process, its origins in ancient Mesopotamia with the rise of warrior kings. Anthropologist David Graeber, with access to more recent translations of cuneiform tablet hoards, elaborated on this story: he tells how the priests of Babylon monopolized production so much that workers were often forced to sell their daughters into temple prostitution to pay their debts (that was a thing in those days). So, many families abandoned the cities and struck out as nomadic tribes—with a fiercely-felt need to protect their women. (You can read all about it in Graeber’s eye-opening study Debt: The First 5,000 Years). So yeah, the story of star-crossed lovers bucking their society and losing is likely a tragedy as old as history itself. Only the music changes.
To Braza and company, I can but echo Jaques in As You Like It, and call out “More, I prithee more!”
Milwaukee Rep presents
Romeo and Juliet
by William Shakespeare
playing through March 30
https://www.milwaukeerep.com/shows/show/romeo-and-juliet
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