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 ridiculous play matters. We’re walking through doorways at sunset, we’re standing and sitting in dirt, and when Juliet says my only love sprung from my only hate, I’m not sitting in velvet darkness pretending I’m not there. I’m fucking right there. I’m implicated. The ground under my feet is the same ground the actors are bleeding all over, metaphorically speaking, and I can’t pretend I’m just observing some museum piece about how people used to feel things before the algorithm taught them not to.
The death march at sunset, that’s not stagecraft. That’s stagecraft admitting defeat to the actual sun. When I can feel the temperature drop and smell whatever’s growing in the California dirt and the light is dying around me on its own schedule, not the lighting designer’s, I stop watching a play and start attending an event. It’s almost too obvious, too easy, except it works because I’ve been sitting in stinky black boxes for so fucking long. Way too long. Most of you have forgotten what the Greeks figured out two thousand years ago. Context matters. Architecture matters. Whether I 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, its own opinions about love and death and which of the two is going to win in any given room, 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.