Romeo and Juliet (review)

Through a combination of necessity and design, Collaborative Arts Theatre’s Romeo and Juliet partially collapsed the distinction between play and public, and more thoroughly effaced the boundary between this theatrical endeavor and the broader urban landscape in which it was set. The audience configuration for this show might be described as “reverse thrust.” Instead of spectators wrapping around the stage, as at the new Globe, three distinct playing areas partially surrounded the public in a semi-circle. These zones were separated from each other by coppices of trees, with narrow walkways downstage connecting them. The first of these “stages,” in the center of the space, used a large concrete fountain (turned off for the occasion) shaped like three giant fish for a backdrop. There was a tall wall behind this fountain, so scenes in the center section could not be upstaged by random activity behind it. This was not the case for the other two playing areas.

A structure stage right provided a balcony for Juliet with a curtained discovery space below and a wide staircase connecting these two levels in a kind of miniature “tiring-house” arrangement. This unit stood on the top of a hill, with a grassy vale behind it. At stage left, some scenes took place in an undecorated space on the edge of an open field. As neither of these side stages employed any kind of masking, the audience’s attention was divided between Romeo and Juliet and the non-theatrical activities of the park’s other denizens, clearly visible beyond the playing area. This situation highlighted some of the cultural challenges associated with the putatively populist notion of “Shakespeare in the Park.” The production was staged at “The Green Uptown,” a park adjacent to an upscale shopping area in downtown Charlotte. The Green is a typical attempt at urban gentrification aimed at luring upscale suburbanites into downtown Charlotte. The audience for Romeo and Juliet constituted this target demographic. Yet as well-heeled yuppies sipped Chardonnay on picnic blankets while they watched the play, poorer full-time residents of the neighborhood were present at the proceedings without being engaged in the tragedy. Kimberley Pixton Millar’s decision to costume Romeo and Juliet in contemporary, upscale, “business casual” clothing accentuated a distinction, not between the Capulets and the Montagues (who were equally natty), but rather between the well-dressed actors and playgoers on the one hand and more shabbily-attired members of the underclass who haunted the proceedings like revenants from a past of urban blight.

Because no physical barrier separated the playing area from the open park, disinterested passers-by frequently entered into the audience’s field of vision and, at times, onto the stage itself. More than mere distractions, these intrusions of the “real world” into the fiction of performance at times created theatrical meaning of their own. On the evening I attended, the most fortuitous such occasion came when Romeo, descending the staircase from Juliet’s balcony following the consummation of their marriage, bumped into a very pregnant teenager carrying a pizza through the park. “There goes Juliet in nine months,” my companion whispered. At times the production attempted to take advantage of the fluid boundary between the play and its setting. Two performers dressed as park grounds-keepers seamlessly integrated the first scene into the rustic atmosphere, eventually using their landscaping tools as weapons during the opening brawl. The evening’s most effective “gotcha” moment...