By
Graig Uhlin
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Green Thursday queer theater takes an unconventional approach to Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet'
Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" may be the greatest love story ever told, but it's never been told like this.
Green Thursday Theater Project, a local queer theater collective founded in December, offers a queer perspective of the classic romance with its production of Joe Calarco's "Shakespeare's R & J," opening Saturday.
The play centers around four boys who, after the their school bans the classic Shakespeare work, act out portions of the famous love story. Each boy plays several roles within the play, including the star-crossed lovers. The boys have to confront the moment where Romeo and Juliet kiss.
"I think it's interesting in the way that it takes these four students on a journey and they explore their sexuality," said theater arts freshman William Cabrera, who plays Romeo as well as other characters.
In that exploration, the boys discover that "it doesn't matter who is expressing it, it's still love," said director David Morden.
"(The boys) learn that as human beings we all share pretty much the same experiences - that is the same whether it is men or women," he added. "We are all human beings and we all have these passions."
"R & J" is not just a gay version of the Shakespeare tragedy - the four boys, in fact, are straight - but Morden, who also worked in queer theater while living in Seattle, said that retelling these stories from a queer perspective allows their universal themes to come through.
This form of theater is also known as "fringe" theater, or theater that experiments with creative, idiosyncratic productions that stray from mainstream theater.
"(In Seattle), we would take the classics and look at them from a queer point of view. We would turn the theatrical conventions upside down," said Morden, who is also Green Thursday's co-founder. "What we usually found in doing that was the essence of the play itself. By turning it inside out, you get a new perspective but you are still looking at the original piece."
For "R & J," Morden identified this essence as that of forbidden love. In Shakespeare's original version of the play, Romeo and Juliet could not consummate their love because they were members of dueling families. Due to these prohibitions on their love, the star-crossed lovers eventually killed themselves. Morden said that Calarco, in writing the play, looked for the modern equivalent.
"(Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet') is all about forbidden love," Morden said. "What's the equivalent of the forbidden love of then that we might experience now?"
Morden points to the stigmatization of homosexual relationships in contemporary society for that equivalent, an issue which both he and Cabrera said the play addresses.
"It's not easy to be young and gay and love another person because there are people out there who are so closeminded," Cabrera said. "I think (the play) really closely parallels what Shakespeare had in mind when it comes to forbidden love."
"Shakespeare's R & J," which goes right to the core of the classic tragedy, similarly utilizes only the bare essentials in props and scenery to get its point across.
"What is really wonderful about this adaptation is that the only props are a length of fabric and the script of 'Romeo and Juliet,'" Morden said. "How do you do a sword fight with a length of fabric?"
Carbrera said this bare-bones approach challenged him when acting.
"It's harder to put yourself in the world of the play when you don't have this great scenery to help," he said. "At the same time, it allows you to move about more freely."
Conversely, this approach engages the audience and elicits their participation in the play, Morden said.
"You end up using your imagination so actively when you're watching it," he said. "It forces the audience to connect the dots, to use their imagination and participate in the creation of the story. They become sort of the fifth actor."
It is precisely this engagement with the audience that "R & J" is seeking, so that through the characters, the viewers will come to acknowledge the universality of love and recognize it within their own lives.
"The magic and mystery of theater," Morden said, "is that if you tell something personal, it becomes a universal."
