Paul: Have you directed Romeo before, or is this your first?Įric: This is actually my first Shakespeare, completely. The language takes care of itself if you pronounce it in the rhythm in which it was made, without affectation or stresses to make things ‘poetic.’ … When you follow the punctuation, almost anyone can sound good speaking Shakespeare.”īELOW IS A TRANSCRIPT OF OUR CONVERSATION WITH ERIC “In Shakespearean practice they spoke really fast, and they never stopped unless there was a period. “So what’s making this vibrant and vital and alive for us is going back and letting the text tell us what to do.” As for making the language sound naturalistic, it’s easier than people think, he says. So where does one start in creating one of the most-performed plays in history? “We’re standing, of course, on the backs of hundreds of years of productions of this play,” Eric says.

(“One of the reasons I took the job here was so that I could do things like Death of a Salesman, Romeo and Cabaret, things I would never get to do elsewhere.”) For his love-couple Eric has chosen not Equity actors but two UMKC graduate students, Courtney Salvage and Jamie Dufault, “because they’re just spectacular.” This Romeo is Eric’s first Shakespeare ever, partly because today’s theater culture rarely presents young or mid-career directors the chance to take on big shows such as this. “They wouldn’t love each other so much if their parents didn’t hate each other so much.” For the bard, “it’s kind of a fusion, where the hate fuels the love, and the love fuels the passion of the hate.” … It feels like Shakespeare left that vague, and that they hate each other for stupid reasons: that they’re much more alike than they are different.” Yet the hatred is inextricably linked to the young couple’s love. There’s very little detail as to why the Montagues and the Capulets hate each other. And there’s very little in the text to suggest, for example, that the embattled families are from different cultural or ethnic backgrounds (black versus white, Confederacy versus Union, Puerto Rican versus whatever) as subsequent takes on the tale have suggested.

Thus after a straightforward beginning that is spare and even a bit drab, at the moment when Romeo and Juliet enter the masquerade “everything bursts into light and color and theatricality,” Eric says, “and it becomes a really fascinating world … until the moment in which they die, at which point all of the magic and enchantment disappears.”Īctors are to check their presuppositions at the door for this show, Eric says, because his goal is to return to what Shakespeare wrote. “To me Romeo and Juliet is about the profound enchantment of first love,” says Eric, now in his sixth season with the Rep, “as something that is both incredibly passionate and beautiful, and something that is terrifying and potentially disruptive.” All this is reflected in the physical production, he says, as created by Jack Magaw (scenic design), Victor En Yu Tan (lighting design) and a small army of costume, sound, musical, choreographic and swordfight artists. Inspired by his recent travels through Italy and especially his visit to the so-called “Juliet’s Balcony” in Verona (where he said he had a “huge epiphany about what the play is about”), Eric wants to move away from the idea of “warring tribes” and turn the focus back to the lovers themselves. Armed with this premise Kansas City Repertory Theatre artistic director Eric Rosen has begun building his daring new production of Romeo and Juliet, a co-production with UMKC Theatre that opens January 17th. Love is like a virus: It infects not just the lovers themselves but all those around them.

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