In this production, Portland-based director Dámaso Rodríguez stages the play in its Verona setting (c. 1480–1520), fully investigating the history and social context that informed the many versions of the “Romeo and Juliet” story preceding Shakespeare’s adaptation. During an OSF workshop reading, he talked about his decision to focus on the script.
“The original text allows us to draw recognizable parallels to our present-day divisive political climate,” he said. For Rodríguez, setting the play in its original given circumstances while presenting it from a modern point of view through a consciously cast diverse and gender-balanced company of actors ensures that the reason for the feud is not interpreted as based on race or ethnicity.
Rodríguez champions engaging with bold new works, most recently Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon at Artists Repertory Theatre, where he is also artistic director. To this production of Romeo and Juliet, he brings the vision of working with a new play.
“Shakespeare’s 16th-century tragedy of young love thwarted by a community’s long-standing prejudice continues to be universally resonant and alarmingly relevant to our ever-polarized 21st-century society,” he says. “We continue to live in a world where hate and bias are taught and passed on to the subsequent generation. Shakespeare brilliantly left the reasons for the divide between Capulet and Montague unspecified, giving the play endless universal resonance.”
Rodríguez is excited about telling this story at OSF. “This will be a contemporary company’s ritual re-telling of a centuries-old story, and we will take a cue from the opening Chorus by maintaining the convention that the actors are actively aware of and engaged with an audience that has gathered to listen.”
For Rodriguez, these choices work to magnify the emotional stakes of the play and invite audiences to lean in and listen to the lessons the play promises from the outset of the Prologue. “I’m interested in conveying to our audience a visceral understanding of the depth of the too-recognizable divisions in the play and hope to leave a sense of our society’s ironic compulsion to repeat painful mistakes that could be avoided.”
—Tiffany Ana López
Reprinted from OSF’s 2018 Illuminations, a 64-page guide to the season’s plays. Members at the Donor level and above and teachers who bring school groups to OSF receive a free copy of Illuminations.