Romeo and Juliet Deconstructed
Romeo and Juliet Deconstructed
By William Shakespeare
Adaptation conceived by John DiDonna
August 15, 2015
Valencia College East, Orlando FL</strong>
This is a work in progress, so if it reappears in a radically different form next time, you’ve been warned. I’ve often stated my objection to R&J: its bad advice to teenagers. But I still love it for what it isn’t and here Dr. DiDonna has turned his summer acting students loose on it with the vague instructions: “Deconstruct this”. Deconstructionism flickers in popularity; the best examination I had was “Batman is a Good Guy. But he works outside the law, just like criminals, thus he is also a Bad Guy.” Ipso facto “R&J is a romance, but nobody gets whom they want, and thus it is a tragedy.” Even the Bard recognized that, so the task here is to update or re-interpret the story.
To this end, we were all given little packs of scenes and locations, and then each viewer took their own path through the story. No one person observed all action (I missed the Friar John scene among others.) What we had resulted in two resolutions. First off, one of the audience members seems to have come down with heat stroke. It IS August in Central Florida and we met before the biblical lighting and rain began, but casualties were pretty much pre-ordained either way. The second was an occasionally successful attempt to layer modern romantic and political sentiments on to an ancient tale of political marriage screwed up by horny young men. The abandonment of Rosalind, normally glanced over in “real” productions came forward; Romeo’s failed attempt at the rape of Juliet felt the cleanest of the new scenes, and Parris’ meeting up with Rosalind at the bus station cleaned up a loose end or two that never were addressed in the source material.
The addition of new scenes and relations was effective; what was less effective was the mis- alignment of Arranged vs romantic marriage. An imposing Ms. Capulet held out that a 13 year old girl had no business deciding when she would wed, but it WAS ok for her to get down to baby making before she lost all her baby teeth. The Nurse felt whiney, and we are missing Tybalt and Benvolio although one could argue they are merely McGuffins to get the action going. Yes, it was hot on fair Verona where we sweated out this tale of romance and bad decision making, and it may appear in the fall line up. But I say to Mr. Didonna: “Bring me BODIES!” Just not audience bodies.
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