Romeo by many other names

Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?

When the question is posed at an Aquila Theatre Company production, the answer is because thine name was plucked from a hat.

The acclaimed New York-based theater company is now touring a star-crossed version of Romeo and Juliet in which the casting is determined by the drawing of lots: Audience members at each show blindly select each actor’s role for the evening, a ploy that Producing Artistic Director Peter Meineck says restores an electricity to live theater that’s been grounded by overly polished productions in which nobody ever forgets a line or misses a cue.

“Straightaway it creates excitement,” explains Meineck. “Every night is opening night.”

According to Meineck, the rowdy hooligans who filled the benches at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater weren’t just hyped up on mead. The Elizabethan performers’ nervous energy—it was common for actors to have just one week to familiarize themselves with the Bard’s script and only one companywide rehearsal before a play’s debut—infected the auditorium. Drama was the professional figure skating of its day, with the constant risk of a spectacular flameout creating a breathless excitement among its fans. It wasn’t the least bit unusual for Globe patrons to stomp their feet and howl—and those were the best-behaved of them.

Aquila’s unorthodox approach to perhaps the most well known of Shakespeare’s many plays has succeeded in freeing its contemporary audiences from conventions that require them to sit quietly and absorb the action. Boisterousness is ruling the rows again, Meineck said, with ticket-holders sometimes loudly protesting when a middle-aged man is selected as Juliet.

“I’ve never heard people talk so much at intermission,” Meineck, the company’s founder, says with some amazement. “We try to create conversation, so it’s wonderful to hear.”

Audiences aren’t just titillated by the very real possibility of bloopers: Meineck believes rearranging the ages, races and genders of iconic roles prompts viewers to rethink their understanding of the play and its meaning.

“Romeo and Juliet is one of the most difficult plays to create new,” says Meineck. “But this really is a play about love, and how anybody can have this overwhelming love for anyone at any time. Anybody could be Romeo or Juliet.”

Or, everybody could be Romeo or Juliet. Every member of the company learned every role in the play, and while Romeo remains the favorite part for male and female actors alike, most everyone has pulled Balthasar or Abraham duty.

Although the casting-on-the-fly concept sounds madcap, the company—under the artistic direction of Meineck, who moonlights as a Classics professor at New York University and is an award-winning translator of Aristophanes—was exceedingly meticulous in its preparation, a process complicated by the thousands of mathematically possible cast combinations. Even basic blocking was fraught with difficulties: Would Romeo be embracing a wisp of a girl or a hulk of a man?

“It was the hardest rehearsal we’ve ever done,” Meineck says. “Some of our senior actors hadn’t been pushed so hard in 16 years.”

One of the toughest hurdles for the actors was becoming accustomed to playing opposite a character whose lines they knew—and could deliver with feeling. Like so many of Shakespeare’s works, Romeo and Juliet is predicated on misunderstanding, so any indication of such familiarity could undo a performance.

“It’s definitely a real challenge,” Meineck says. “The actors are constantly working.”

Role-swapping isn’t unprecedented in Shakespeare: John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier famously alternated the roles of Romeo and Mercutio in a 1935 stage production, hailed as a triumphant experiment. But Aquila’s technique, which emerged from workshopping the roles of Romeo and Juliet as two men and two women, is new.

“I don’t think anyone else would be stupid enough to try it,” Meineck says.

Nor is he sure it would be as effective when applied to Shakespeare’s political dramas, which are populated by so many men of indeterminate age. Theatergoers have a fixed vision of Juliet as a teenaged beauty, and tend to squirm in their seats when a lanky older fellow with a weather-beaten face steps into the role.

Although audiences seem willing to accept a female Romeo, they apparently feel entitled to a white Juliet with classically lovely features.

“I love it when Kenn Sabberton, who’s 55, plays Juliet,” says Meineck. “It’s interesting what it brings up. Your imagination is forced to work harder.”

Actors cast in roles so obviously at odds with their physiques strive not to create caricatures of their characters: “If you make it a drag act, or you make it a little bit campy, you lose the text,” says Meineck, conceding that the male actors have exploited the comic possibilities of playing Juliet’s nurse.

“We pushed the envelope on this one,” says Meineck. “This production was a great risk. We didn’t know if we’d pull it off.”

Aquila’s famously progressive productions have encountered skepticism nearly everywhere they’re staged, including the White House. Nervous staffers worried the company’s go-go take on Much Ado About Nothing would offend the building’s current residents, whose artistic tastes run to the Everly Brothers and Field of Dreams. But in an interview with the Washington Post published earlier this month, Laura Bush named the 2005 production the best Shakespeare she’d ever seen.

“Sometimes you have to take risks,” says Meineck. “The device we’re using is quite magical, and I think theater should be magical. Otherwise, why would you leave your living room?”