By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Spoiler alert: No one dies in the Horizon Youth Theatre’s production of “Romeo and Juliet.”
Some characters get sent to the nurse’s office, or off to see the principal, or are banished to the time out bench.
The physical toll is maybe a bruise or scratch.
That doesn’t keep the characters from exclaiming in passionate verse about how sorely they are wounded — the kind of overreaction you expect from a 10-year-old.
Director Cassie Greenlee has set the classic tragedy on the playground of the Verona Elementary School. HYT’s “Romeo and Juliet” opens tonight, Thursday, Oct. 3, at 7 p.m. in the Otsego High auditorium, and continues Saturday at 7 and Sunday at 2.
She and her young cast manage what seems an impossible balancing act between Shakespeare’s poetry, which is almost entirely kept intact, and the emotions and personalities of a group of elementary students. This matching of the passion of “Romeo and Juliet” with outsized juvenile emotions is strikingly effective.
The result gives the tragedy a comic jolt with our star-crossed lovers crossing the threshold of the school hand-in-hand at the end.
The audience also gets to hear these familiar lines in a fresh way. Credit the actors who really get their tongues around the sometimes knotty lines, and make it seem natural.
These are teens playing younger kids, a twist on the usual practice of having adults playing teens.
Mercutio (Dylan Perez) is the perfect schoolyard cut up in his long, fanciful monologue decrying dreams. Romeo (Mason Clifford) and Benvolio (Isaac Slater) can barely control their exasperation, though Mercutio seems to be entertaining himself well enough.
While the cast is uniformly excellent, Narnia Rieske as Juliet stands out. She epitomizes the production’s vision. Her Juliet is like none other. Her character seems untouched by any previous version. Instead our heroine is an anxious youngster. When Romeo spies her on top of the slide, she’s having a very animated conversation with herself. His entreaties interrupt her, and her response seems to grow from her internal monologue.
When she learns that Romeo is banished, her hysterics reflect how a 10-year-old experiences such pain.
The hierarchy of Shakespeare’s Verona is replaced by that of the school yard, which in its way is just as rigid.
So the parents are replaced by those students charged to be line leaders and door holders.
Bob Walters as the leader of the Capulets is the foremost adult character. Early on he keeps the hot-headed Tybalt (Terra Sloane) from attacking Romeo at a party. Romeo has gone seeking the girl he loves, Rosaline (Anjalie Coates), who has rejected him. Instead with childish impulsiveness he spies and falls in love with Juliet.
Walters has another chance to shine when he brutally scolds Juliet for refusing to marry Paris (Eli Marx).
Lauren Clifford plays the nurse, carrying around a toy medical kit, with just a hint of maternal instinct. Sophi Hachtel also translates her character, Lawrence (the friar is dropped), as a bookish peer of Romeo.
Overseeing this are Isaac Douglass as the playground monitor, who uses physical humor to comment on the action, and Katie Partlow as the imposing Vice Principal Escalus.
All this takes place against the playground backdrop where the other kids congregate and play in the background.
Some of the equipment, Greenlee said, was recently outside at Plan, Do and Talk, which is the new home of the Black Swamp Players.
Greenlee gave her cast license to punctuate the script with brief contemporary interjections.
Those don’t interrupt the flow of the script.
“Romeo and Juliet” has spoken to more than 20 generations, and Horizon Youth’s production gives yet another generation the chance to tell the story of these young lovers in its own distinctive voice.
