Romeo Juliet (review)

I came to the Hypocrites production of Romeo Juliet [sic] with high hopes based on my experience seeing Sean Graney’s impressive Comedy of Errors at the Court Theatre (reviewed in Shakespeare Bulletin 29.1). With Romeo I came onto Graney’s home turf: he founded the Hypocrites, and has directed thirty productions with them since 1997. Errors was produced in the 250-seat Abelson Auditorium, a state-of-the-art performance space on the campus of the University of Chicago which ranks with the best in town—as in Steppenwolf and the Goodman Theatre. The actors and production crew were of the same level: many had experience with Steppenwolf or Chicago Shakespeare Theatre or Writers’ Theatre or Goodman. I knew I would get a different experience at the aging but hip Chopin Theatre (one of the city’s old film palaces, built in 1918 and converted to its present use in 1990), which seats 200. This show turned out to be in the theatre’s smaller space, which had been fitted with the production’s unique design, and had room for just 40 audience members. The production was indeed designed by the four actors, something that obviously saved money but also had interesting implications for the way this no-holds-barred adaptation might develop. These were non-Equity actors, with plenty of experience on various Chicago stages, but, as a rule, less exalted stages than the cast of Errors. While Graney was not working with the kind of budget that the Court could provide, he was working with, I presumed, familiar materials, and so the potential for the show could be very high.

From the start, or rather, from before the start, this production’s obsession with breaking down barriers with the audience was apparent. While we drank Polish beer in the lounge, an actor came out to ask us for our background music preference—we chose Leonard Cohen. Then, when it was time for the show to start, we put down our beers and headed into an area with picnic tables where we were served tea and asked to write statements concerning love on “valentines” to be posted on a wall of the room. The tea was served by actors who smiled at us and appeared ready to chat. We were told, before we entered the performance space, that we could feel free to remove our shoes, but that if we didn’t, to be sure not to walk on the thick carpet on which the actors would be performing barefoot. Then we filed into the square tent of the performance space, ten audience members on each side, with lighting provided by a couple of Ikea War-of-the-Worlds-style adjustable floor lamps, and the only other set pieces a small table which doubled as a sheathe for four swords, and a seventies-era stereo. At a certain point in the show, cast members began to pass out oranges to peel and share with our neighbors—in lieu, perhaps, of an interval and another trip to the bar (the show was in one act, and not much over an hour).

Graney worked to some extent with the libretto from a Bellini opera from the nineteenth century. The librettist, Felice Romani, used the same source materials as Shakespeare’s play without any first-hand knowledge of the Shakespeare version. The purpose of using this text seemed twofold—first to get a fresh take on these most culturally freighted materials, and second, to have some insight into how to cut the play’s 30-some characters to a more manageable...