Romeo & Juliet

Director’s Notes

“These violent delights have violent ends…”
Welcome to our production of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet! The company has been hard at work since the Fall to bring this production to the McCrary stage. One of the exciting challenges of this script is its mix of styles, its mix of high and low, its mix of comedy and tragedy. Just Shakespeare’s language choices alone might give one whiplash; we have the bawdy humor of the young people, the unsurpassed poetry of young love, and the absolute tragedy expressed after the loss of life. Similarly, the settings he presents give depth and scope to the world of the play: a mix of violent street fights, a decadent masquerade ball, a moonlit garden balcony, and a silent graveyard tomb.
This production situates Verona, Italy, in the early 1970s: an Italy caught between tradition and modernity, between the weight of Catholic conservatism and the liberation of youth culture, between violent clashes of governmental control, liberalism, and neo-fascism. In that friction, the Montague-Capulet feud becomes something urgent, a study in generational divide. The parents cling to old codes of honor and respectability. Their children reach for freedom, music, and the possibility of reinvention.
I imagined that the love between Romeo and Juliet, both electric and instantaneous, pulsed like an Italian disco track cutting through their feelings of repression. For the young lovers, finding each other is not merely romance; it is resistance. And their tragic ending is not an accident; it is inevitable when they are struggling against the older generation, who are meant to guide and support them.
We can imagine that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet primarily to explore the destructive power of hate and the redemptive, yet ultimately futile, force of love when set against it. Through the doomed romance of two young lovers, he showed that blind, inherited hatred between the Montagues and Capulets is the true villain of the play, not fate or the lovers themselves. Yet Shakespeare also complicates any simple moral: love in the play is impulsive, irrational, and reckless, suggesting that passion alone cannot save us from the world we inherit. The tragedy is designed to hold a mirror up to the audience, asking us to look at civic and familial hatred and showing us its cost in the bodies of children.
Whether this is your first Shakespeare production or your hundredth, we hope you enjoy the show!
Julian Stetkevych, Director

Special Thanks

President Connie Book, Provost Rebecca Kohn, Dean Hilton Kelly, Performing Arts Chair Fred Rubeck, Richard Stephenson

Bios