Waterworld

Romeo and Juliet get wet at Trinity

by Johnette Rodriguez

The first thing you'll notice about Brian Kulick and Mark Wendland's production of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (at Trinity Rep April 4 through May 24) are the stars -- an illuminated map of the heavens across the back wall of the upstairs theater. The next thing you'll see are the reflections of these twinkling constellations in the shallow pool of water beneath them.

Water? On stage? From the inventive director and designer team of Trinity's The Illusion, The Return of Don Quixote, and Fires In the Mirror and the Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival's production of Timon of Athens last summer, Romeo and Juliet would have to take on a different look than brocade bed-curtains and vine-covered balconies, but why water?

"We wanted to imagine an otherworldly space, a place where Romeo and Juliet are trapped `between heaven and hell,' " said Kulick, during a conversation in the upstairs lobby of Trinity last week. "Water is a very rich metaphor, invoking life, death, cleansing, rejuvenation."

"Brian and I were looking for something different than a guy in tights with his foot on a crate," added Wendland. "It's boring for Mercutio and Tybalt to have a fight with swords; the audience sees it for the choreographed dance that it is. But with the water, they will be rolling around in it and holding each other down in the water, so it will be completely different."

This Romeo and Juliet will be completely different in other ways as well. Since this play has been performed "for 433 years and currently every night somewhere in the world," according to Kulick, he and Wendland thought of the lovers like Paolo and Franscesca in the second Circle of Hell, doomed to tell their story over and over again.

"What would happen if we started with them dead?" Kulick proposed. "Let's imagine that the Friar, after making these fatal mistakes, commits suicide, so we have him, Romeo and Juliet, Tybalt and Mercutio, revived by three shadowy forensic types, who then facilitate their stories in flashbacks."

This also goes along with Kulick's view of Fate as a key motif in the play -- "the characters get these shivers of dreaded future-tenseness." By telling the story in retrospect, the foreshadowing of the numerous astronomical and astrological references in Romeo and Juliet is enhanced. And the starlit heavens behind the actors make manifest such speeches as Romeo's: "My mind misgives/some consequence yet hanging in the stars/ shall bitterly begin his fearful date/ with this night's revels."

For, despite trimmings, modifications and reshufflings, Kulick and Wendland are nothing if not devoted to the text of the play and all it has to offer in bare-bones plot, underlying stories and the playwright's sociological observations. Kulick compared Shakespeare's plays to diamonds, with each director presenting a different facet, while being unable to present a 360-degree view of the gem.

Kulick and Wendland have pared the play down to a "chamber piece," with fewer characters and fewer scenes. This allows them to take a harder look at key scenes between the lovers and to keep them intact -- "to really see those scenes for what they are, as Mr. Shakespeare wrote them," in Kulick's words. Many productions nip and tuck at every scene, to the detriment of Shakespeare's ever-broadening explorations into the complex meaning of words and lines spoken by the characters.

A close examination of Romeo and Juliet led Kulick to a different interpretation than the West Side Story take on it, that the society in which they lived destroyed their love.

"I think Shakespeare is saying that in a culture of violence and extremity, violence filters down into every social interaction, infecting everything, even something as beautiful and tender as this love," explained Kulick. "Violence impacts on how Capulet deals with his daughter, how Mercutio plays with Romeo. Everything Romeo and Juliet do is as rash, as mercurial as all these gangs.

"And when violence gets to love, it's a lost world," he continued. "Eros as a Renaissance concept is that love is a common bond that holds everything together. If you kill love, if you unseat Eros, society will crumble and fall apart. So I think the play is not only a celebration of Romeo and Juliet's love but a critique of their rashness."

Kulick has also found in the text that Juliet is a lot stronger, written with far more fiber, than she is often portrayed -- "she's as ferocious a fighter as Tybalt." Newcomer Tari Signor, a Julliard grad with Shakespearean experience, will take on that role, with newcomer Mark H. Dold, a member of the Timon of Athens cast, as Romeo. (Trinity members Ed Shea, Barbara Meek, Brian McEleney and Robert J. Colonna, plus Conservatory students Eric Tucker and Doug Brandt portray the rest of the characters.)

"We never intend this to just be `cool,' " asserted Kulick, with a characteristic grin. "The text is not just a pretext to do something else. Our concept is to illuminate the aspects of fate and predestination in the text and to focus just on the lovers and see how the violence has seeped into them.

"We want to bring out aspects you might not always see," he noted. "Sometimes when you displace the play slightly, the audience listens harder."

As for the costumes, which Wendland also designed, the two thought about how Elizabethans would have prepared a body, about what Purgatorial figures would look like in a vaguely Renaissance sense. They also wanted to keep the actors dry, so rubber is an active ingredient in some of the outfits.

Ah, yes, actors plus water. At the time of my conversations with Kulick and Wendland, the cast had not yet rehearsed in situ, or in aqua, as it were.

"The stage will tell us other things," Kulick maintained. "The set will add to the kinetics of the play. It adds an obstacle -- but in the good sense."

"The set really does have an other-worldly quality," Wendland emphasized. "It lifts the play to an ethereal place. Plus, doing any Shakespeare work, it's so text-heavy. Our generation is so used to things that are visual-heavy that we wanted to take a complex scene and activate it in an interesting way.

"A more traditional Romeo and Juliet has things all tied up," he reflected. "We wanted to create an environment that leaves the audience asking a lot of questions. `Why is everything happening this way? Oh, I never thought of her doing that!' I want the audience to be surprised, so that they become more active in the theatrical event."

With this Romeo and Juliet, it seems certain that they will be, especially those seated in the front row.