Even after four hundred years, Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet can still be found on stage. This weekend I attended Nicholls State University’s production of Romeo and Juliet by the Nicholls Player’s Club.
Though the dialogue in the play was original to Shakespeare’s original lines (though shortened and adjusted to the two hour time frame), the play had a modern backdrop of a political campaign. The play begins with Montague and Capulet campaigning against each other in a campaign complete with a video camera carrying press. How relevant in this campaign year? The music soundtrack was also current music reminiscent of teenage television shows, and at times it felt like High School Musical meets Shakespeare.
Somewhere in the middle of the play, I realized why students love Romeo and Juliet much more than the Julius Caesar play I’m forced to teach as a tenth grade English teacher. It’s like the four hundred year old version of Twilight but in a language you can’t understand anymore. (I don’t understand teenage slang either. So that’s just one of the many similarities to begin the list.) Romeo and Juliet has the instant love at first sight storyline, the love triangle with Romeo-Juliet-Paris, teenagers getting married, and the violence similar to vampires trying to kill each other. Romeo and Juliet is not so different from the unrealistic love stories found in today’s teen books. After four hundred years, we’re still reading stories that give us the same storyline. Our tastes haven’t changed though the language has.
The NSU players delivered a great performance though. I can remember back in college when my college professor became enraged when the Leonardo Dicaprio movie came out because of its modern adaption and its use of guns. This version used campaign poster sticks as weapons and even had sword fights with hammers. Not to mention Juliet’s recording of a misbehaving, female Mercutio scene with her cellphone and no doubt posting it to Youtube. There was only one scene where a gun was used, and though it did feel out of place for me, it wasn’t done with the same intent as Dicaprio’s movie version.
In the end Romeo and Juliet died. This certainly requires no spoiler alert. The fate of those star-crossed lovers never changes even after four hundred years. Though all those modern-day story adaptions appear to forget that when they describe the storyline as Romeo and Juliet like.
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