My only love sprung from my only hate!
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!
Prodigious birth of love it is to me,
That I must love a loathed enemy.
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 1.5
We’re all so fucking scared of being earnest that we’ve turned every production into a knowing wink, a deconstructed joke we’re all in on together. But then you drag Shakespeare’s most adolescent, hormonal, genuinely stupid tragedy out to some crumbling adobe in Petaluma, and suddenly you remember why any of this mattered in the first place. You’re walking through doorways at sunset, you’re standing in dirt, and when Juliet says “my only love sprung from my only hate,” you’re not sitting in velvet darkness pretending you’re not there. You’re there. You’re implicated. The ground under your feet is the same ground the actors are bleeding all over, metaphorically speaking, and you can’t pretend you’re just observing some museum piece about how people used to feel things before Netflix.
The death march at sunset, that’s not stagecraft, that’s just acknowledging that tragedy works better when the light is actually dying around you. When you can feel the temperature drop and smell whatever’s growing in the California dirt. It’s almost too obvious, too easy, except it works because we’ve been sitting in stinky black boxes for so long we forgot that the Greeks already figured this shit out two thousand years ago: context matters. Architecture matters. Whether you can leave matters.
And Romeo and Juliet, God, what a choice. Everyone thinks they know this play because they were forced to read it at fifteen when they were exactly as hormonally fucked up stupid as the protagonists. But put it in a space that has its own history, its own ghosts, and suddenly you realize the play was never about romance. It was about what happens when passion meets architecture, when the intensely personal collides with the immovably institutional. These kids are dying because buildings, families, structures, adobes, don’t bend.
We Players Romeo and Juliet: a production of William Shakespeare’s tragedy at Rancho Petaluma Adobe State Park.