 ROMEO AND JULIET
Thank you for joining us for our 5th production! The process of bringing Romeo and Juliet together has helped us develop even further as a company. We learned so much, plunging into some deep emotions and soaring with high ambitions. We were very fortunate to continue our ties with our inspiration, Shakespeare & Company, through the contributions of our wonderful fight coordinator, Corinna May, who is a member of that company. All in all, it has been an exciting journey.
I originally wasn't keen to try this play since it is such an icon of Shakespeare and has been done by everyone. However, the temptation to hear the incredible poetry of Romeo and the raw emotion of Juliet in the mouths of children who were almost the right age to be those characters won me over. It makes the balcony scene all the more adorable and the deaths unthinkable. Listening to these children play the teenage lovers, I discovered a sharper awareness of how a child might magnify the problems and the violence in the world around him and sometimes personalize it so intensely as to allow him to despair and even kill himself.
The Capulets and the Montagues are metaphors for any number of other warring factions. I chose to do the costumes for these two families in traditional colors - reds for Capulets, blues for Montagues, and purple for the Prince's family or neutral parties. It was another way to give the children a sense of the history and tradition of this most famous play. As I wondered about why these were the traditional colors, however, it came to me that red and blue are the colors of blood in our bodies. Our system doesn't work correctly unless both work together. They are joined in the heart from which springs love.
So this is my challenge to you, our audience - friends and family brought here by love: at the end of the play take one minute, while the last bit of music plays, to think of the faces of these children all around us and imagine a world where the warring factions could be brought together in love. Imagine a world without hatred and violence. Together we can take a small step toward making it happen.
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