Romeo and Juliet, and: Cymbeline (review)

Orlando Shakespeare Theater has a longstanding reputation for mounting excellent productions of the bard’s work, bringing an important balance to an area whose theatrical culture is mostly devoted to musical and children’s theatre. This is not to say that the theatre’s approach is staid. Take, for example, Bob Phillips’ remarkable stage design in the 2011–2012 season, which seamlessly fused the sensibilities of classic cinematic realism and a more bohemian imaginative expressionism that did not let the repertory demands limit the productions to any sort of minimalism. The back of the stage featured a slate gray arcade veined with vines that crawled up to the balcony over the arcade. Grown into the architecture was a large tree, and part of the balcony’s balustrade had deteriorated. Behind these elements, the night sky at the beginning of the performance of Romeo and Juliet was fretted with pinprick stars and sloping, Mediterranean hills in the background. From the trunk of the tree, the silhouettes of roots swirled across the stage floor, indicating the depths of natural abundance and natural feeling that would challenge this world’s human inhabitants. But the expressionistic roots made way for a working fountain, stage left, with a maiden whose gourd overflowed in a reminder of physical realities.

Thomas Ouellette’s wonderful direction also made Romeo and Juliet simultaneously playful and classic. Of particular merit was the cinematic interpretation of the text, which renewed the drama of a story that is almost painfully familiar to any devotee of Shakespearean theatre. The production opened with the end of the fifth act, when Romeo and Juliet were discovered dead in the tomb. This set in place a framing device that dramatically pointed out our pre-awareness of the arc of this tragedy of star-crossed lovers in a startling, immediate way that the dignified prologue—meant to help first-time viewers to absorb the story—could not come close to touching. (At this point in history, the prologue seems like simple throat-clearing.)

An even bolder cinematic flourish occurred in three different intervals in which different scenes were spliced together, each moving forward in alternate bursts, or sometimes even elapsing at the same time. This technique sped the pace in an effective way, and showed off the symmetry of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. The most memorable of these splices occurred when the Capulet’s illiterate Servingman encountered Romeo and Benvolio with a guest list he could not read, thus unwittingly setting in motion Romeo’s decision to crash the Capulet’s party to stalk Rosaline, whom he thought was his romantic destiny—a scene that was interwoven with that of Lady Capulet and the Nurse discussing Juliet’s matrimonial future. Both scenes occupied the same space, with the actors’ focus on their appropriate scenic interlocutors letting the audience know which scene was which. At one point, both Romeo...