The Aquila Theatre Company's recent touring production of Romeo and Juliet adapted one of Shakespeare's most popular plays so that the actors—except for those playing Romeo and Juliet—took multiple parts that crossed age, gender, and social boundaries. One actor played Mercutio, the Nurse, the County Paris, and the Prince; another Lady Capulet and Benvolio; a third played Tybalt, Montague, and
... [Show full abstract] the Friar; and the last Capulet and the Apothecary. But its most significant innovation was that the casting of parts was left to what the production notes called "chance." At the beginning of the performance each of five actors from the six-member ensemble descended into the audience with a velvet sack containing slips of paper on which acting parts were written. Audience members selected blindly from the sacks to determine the roles each actor would play. Not the least of the pleasures afforded by this innovation was the opportunity to watch the audiences' response to the doling out of parts. On the second night I saw the play, for instance, a young female attendee chose the part for Kenn Sabberton. As she reached into the bag, she said, without malice and seemingly with an ardent desire to witness her own fantasy production: "I hope you are not Juliet." In fact, Sabberton had the night before performed the role of Shakespeare's heroine; on this night, no doubt to the girl's (and, I must confess, my own) great relief, "chance" made him Romeo.
Although the production notes suggested that giving the audience this task made it "complicit" with the play of chance in shaping the actors' particular roles, "often against type, gender, and age," it was not entirely clear what was supposed to be signified by this game of chance. Was the emphasis meant to help thematize the fortune that so ruinously undoes the famous star-crossed lovers? Is Chance kin to Fortune? If so, what does it mean for the audience to be complicit? It seems to me that what makes this directorial decision so interesting is not that it highlights the ways the audience—and its reactions—are complicit with chance or even fortune, but that it helps bring into focus the cultural expectations about gender, physical type, or age that shape the casting, performance, and reception of the play. In this respect, the production provided a compelling invitation to thoughtful analysis on many levels.
The young lady so articulate in what seemed to be her wish that Juliet be played by a woman—or at least not by Kenn Sabberton—seemed to endorse that modern staging convention by which Shakespeare is now almost routinely misrepresented: the part of Juliet was, after all, written for a young man to play. More complexly, she was perhaps guilty of conspiring with the heterosexual (perhaps heterosexist) discourses through which the play is now almost invariably understood. To be sure, I am not casting aspersions, for the production usefully emphasized the many prejudices all of us might bring to the problem of casting the play. I, too, was more charmed by the female Juliet (Lindsay Rae Taylor) the second night I saw the production than I was by Sabberton's Juliet the first. And while Sabberton seemed to me a far richer Romeo than the younger, more traditionally handsome and boyish Andrew Schwartz (who played the part the night before), I could not stop thinking he was successful in spite of being (in my ageist estimation) too old for the part. Schwartz, it seemed to me, was too inexperienced to glean from Romeo's lines the subtlety of passion Sabberton found in them, but he was (in the judgment of a critic weaned on Zeffirelli's film) a more desirable young Romeo. I left the theatre wishing I had seen Wednesday night's Romeo (Schwartz) make love to Thursday night's Juliet (the pert and girlish Taylor)—though neither of them seemed to me to have the mature talent of Sabberton.
Being honest, I have to call this false consciousness, for I have been troubled in the past with how this play written before the concept of heterosexuality existed has been co-opted to do its ideological...
