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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: October 3, 2008 at 6:53 pm by Eve Tushnet

2008-10-03T18:53:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

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SKIRTING THE ISSUES: My review of the Shakespeare Theater’s all-male Romeo and Juliet (closes 10/18! tickets still available! act now while supplies last!):

Love does not alter when it alteration finds; and neither, apparently, does D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre’s all-male interpretation of Romeo and Juliet.

That’s how it would’ve been in Shakespeare’s day, don’t you know? The women characters are all played by men in wigs and dresses, who drop occasionally into deeper voices for comedic effect. Other than that, this is a really well-done, entirely standard production of R & J in which the only innovation is that Romeo drowns Tybalt in a barrel.

The sex-switching doesn’t do much in the end, but it does work well in at least two ways.

First of all, James Davis’s Juliet is amazing. Davis has played adapted Shakespeare drag before–as Julia in 2 Gents (i.e., of Verona) and Lady Capulet in Shakespeare’s R and J–and he’s the standout of this production. He’s all nose and knees, all coltish, breastless edge-of-fourteen. He makes Juliet seem young again. He can chew his wig just the same way every girl chewed her hair when she was just starting middle school–and he can deepen his voice to suggest a level of introspection and intelligence perfectly befitting the character. Director David Muse, in an otherwise unilluminating interview for the theater’s brochure, notes that Juliet was the hardest casting decision; and it’s entirely to his credit that it’s the one he got most obviously right.

Juliet’s tragedy is that she’s an exceptionally precocious, beautiful, intelligent idiot, sophisticated and philosophical and barely adolescent. Somehow the gender confusion in Davis’s performance reflects the inherent conflict between Juliet’s aptitude for abstraction and her lack of maturity. A man who won’t ever grow into his gown makes a terrific girl who hasn’t quite grown into her brain.

(It’s too bad Finn Wittrock’s Romeo can’t match her. He’s all floppy hair and callowness, the Renaissance male equivalent of writing her name in glitter paint on his Trapper Keeper. Romeo is already the dumber one–as is typical for Shakespearean romantic couples–so casting a less-accomplished actor, or perhaps directing him in a more standard-issue style, is just unfair.)

Second, there are moments when the Shakespeare Theatre’s Romeo and Juliet suggests that there might be different archetypes appropriate for men and women–and that Juliet, so often portrayed as an innocent destroyed by a cruel social conflict, might be something more sinister. Juliet as a man, especially in the balcony scene, has echoes of Tadzio, the beautiful boy from “Death in Venice” whose secret name is mortality.

The bright boy called death is a well-known homosexual archetype; but the femme fatale, the heterosexual equivalent, is often a woman well past girlhood. Interestingly, her age often makes her an equal match for her prey—her sex is what makes her vulnerable, what makes her male target think they’re punching in the same weight class. If Juliet is a boy, she’s a boy whose kiss is death; and there is an already-established convention for that, from Dorian Gray to Suddenly, Last Summer.

Unfortunately, the Shakespeare Theatre’s production isn’t willing to commit to this interpretation–or any unconventional interpretation–of the show. The gender-switching makes for a few politicized laughs (Juliet on marriage: “It is an honour that I dream not of”), but overall it offers no especial insight into the play. The tensions and attractions between Romeo and Mercutio, Mercutio and Benvolio, and Romeo and Benvolio are just as ambiguously homosocial/homoerotic as they always are. The Nurse is wonderfully draggy, but that doesn’t really change her character, which I suppose is commentary in itself. Akiva Fox’s brochure commentary on male violence suggests that the gender dynamics should matter, but the production doesn’t bear that out in any unexpected way. The audience seemed generally a bit deflated when it was over, maybe because they’d been expecting something more provocative.

The sad thing is that this is a really great production if you ignore the gimmick. The direction for both of my favorite speeches is subpar–Juliet’s horrified speech about what it will be like to awaken in her family tomb is a little too histrionic; Mercutio’s amazing, play-changing Queen Mab speech, on which an entire and much better all-male production might have been hooked, comes across as manic-depressive rather than otherworldly and Hitchcockian. But almost everything else is fantastic. There are many musical interludes, and they’re all well-done, catchy and evocative and fun to watch. Benvolio is great, Mercutio is fine, and the production allows both the teens and the adults to be just as stupid as they really are in the play. No one will be governed by reason; no one will be ruled by wise counsel. There’s even a nice touch where the chorus, at the very beginning of the play, speaks in their normal masculine voices without wigs, emphasizing the male authorship and viewpoint of the play. (This goes nowhere, maybe because it can’t go anywhere useful; Shakespeare’s women are so smart and real that they are basically the reverse of the academics’ “male gaze.”)

This is a fine production. It’s violent and smarter than its characters. It’s able to see that the Nurse is both practical and melodramatic, and Juliet is both highly intelligent (her “What’s in a name?” speech comes across as almost Heloise-level Scholasticism…and simultaneously a parody of that Scholasticism) and highly silly. (I think it’s Shakespeare’s fault, rather than the production’s, that the most obviously complex characters are women.) It gets that weird, compelling Shakespearean combination of genre convention and genre challenge.

It just doesn’t tell us anything about men and women. In fact, in its ostentatious refusal to shape the interpretation around the all-male gimmick, it pretends that nothing interesting can be said about that difference. “Back in Shakespeare’s day, they did all-male performances because they had these weird beliefs about gender archetypes; but now we know that a man can be just as much Juliet as a girl!”

This would be a better production if it had the courage of its commercialism.

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