Over the years, there have probably been 10,000 balcony scenes in 10,000 productions of “Romeo and Juliet.” And in that time, Juliet’s spot high above the Capulet garden has been played onstage by a window, a ladder, an Italianate porch, even a chair. There have been as many kinds of balconies as there have been lovesick Romeos to yearn under them. But I think I’m safe in saying that the balcony has never yet been played by the Mexico-U.S. border wall.
The latest, strangely low-energy version of Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy, directed by Saheem Ali for the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park, places “fair Verona” along our side of the southern border, crammed up against a familiar, towering fence of rust-brown steel. The set designer Maruti Evans makes the Delacorte stage in front of the wall into a desert dotted with grave markers, and behind the slats, we can see two 18-foot-tall white statues — one a Virgin Mary, the other a grinning skeleton.
Death glides across the sandy scrub, sometimes as horror-movie manifestations: Ali has added a trio of animal-masked spirits, psychopomps who materialize whenever there’s a chance to take a soul. At one point, Romeo (Daniel Bravo Hernández) speaks wildly of suicide, and the death-figures approach, only to slink away when Friar Lawrence (Francis Jue, excellent as always) talks him out of it. Several of these supernatural moments are chilling, though Mike Tracey’s sound design is so faint that his spooky rumblings can be hard to hear.
If all this sounds exciting — the border wall, the eeriness — I can’t blame you. I was thrilled by that first glimpse of the wall; Ali starts with a gorgeous, operatic image of national division. But as his production unfolds, it fumbles that setting, and the metaphors lead in circles. This “Romeo and Juliet” undoes itself through conflicting, increasingly haphazard choices. Scenes have been chopped and subverted, but instead of invigorating old words with new inspiration, these changes can leave the performers saying lines that stop making any sense at all.
One of Ali’s underlying concepts does manage to stay strong throughout. Borrowing a brainwave from his own 2021 audio production, “Romeo y Julieta,” devised for a pandemic-era radio program, he uses a bilingual text: The Capulets are an English-speaking family; the Latino Montagues use mostly Spanish. Juliet (Ra’mya Latiah Aikens) has picked up un poco de Español from her parents’ servant Pedro (Marlon Xavier), and when she and Romeo — pronounced Roméo — meet at a party and exchange a kiss, she also changes tongues, falling into long, fluent passages with her new beloved.
More than 25 percent of New York City speaks Spanish, so the Public does not supertitle Alfredo Michel Modenessi’s translation, which has been woven in and out of Shakespeare’s Early Modern English. For those of us with only hazy Spanish abilities, the classic play’s familiarity fills in the gaps. The impressive Hernández — who hits some stunning heights of fury — also uses bilinguality to do something quite beautiful as Romeo, showing us the man’s quick spirit by waltzing back and forth between two languages.
So when I say that the production has a problem with meaning, I’m not talking about an issue with translation. The problem lies instead in Ali’s slipshod execution of his own concept. The scenario has been so inconsistently thought through that it harms both the show’s political intensity and the existing plot.
We both are and aren’t in a U.S. border town. The evil-coded Capulets wear belted black jackets and high black boots as if they’re part of Mussolini’s Fascisti; Romeo’s immediate family wears richly embroidered robes, and his friend Mercutio (Caleb Joshua Eberhardt) acts like a wealthy college kid kindled by anti-establishment rage.
The Montague-aligned, Spanish-speaking ensemble are played as Indigenous activists, unfurling anti-ICE banners at the wall or linking arms in front of it in peaceful protest. They are sometimes so peaceful they barely move. Even when the Shakespeare text swears that they’re brawling, these supernumeraries stand mutely and awkwardly in a line. The sense of balance in the drama is thus reduced to rubble. When Mercutio says to Romeo, “A plague on both your houses,” after getting wounded in a confrontation with Tybalt (Ariyan Kassam), it’s confusing. The Montague side hasn’t done anything violent. What is Mercutio talking about?
It’s always a gamble to try tragedy at the Delacorte. So many factors fight our ability to focus: the heat (or threat of rain), the helicopters beetling along above the Great Lawn. It’s not impossible — “Troilus and Cressida” in 2016 was wonderful — but it’s a challenge. What you need is clarity, attention to storytelling and confidence. This production fails at several hurdles by underpreparing the actors, and, in several places, undermining them.
Just to take one example, the apothecary (Rachel Crowl) who sells Romeo poison has been bewilderingly dressed, by the costume designer Oana Botez, as a Catholic priest in a dirty, gilded robe. Shakespeare tells us a single thing about this character: The apothecary is poor. “My poverty, but not my will consents,” says the desperate drug dealer, though here Crowl must avert her eyes from the jewels on her chasuble to do so. The part has been either overthought or under examined, but the result’s the same — words turned into nonsense.
Ali, who is also associate artistic director of the Public, has directed three of the New York Shakespeare Festival’s marquee productions: “Merry Wives” (2021), last summer’s starry “Twelfth Night” and now “Romeo and Juliet.” He’s strongest with comic collaborators — “Twelfth Night” worked best, for example, when Peter Dinklage’s Malvolio and Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s Andrew Aguecheek ran wild. Here, the boisterous Nurse (Deirdre O’Connell) has several funny moments with her saucy charge Juliet. Together they giggle adorably; their moments are warm, even bright.
But the Delacorte’s huge outdoor stage needs a director more comfortable with staging action and group scenes — for “Romeo and Juliet,” in which Verona’s warring houses play a crucial role, unsteadiness in handling the ensemble is fatal. And the emotional stuff just goes thud. When Juliet awakens in her family crypt to find her young husband dying as he leans over her, for instance, we lose several of that excruciating scene’s key beats. It’s a pretty famous moment, when she stabs herself, but Ali has explicitly cut the dagger (while laboriously emphasizing it in an earlier moment). The editing of the play grows particularly slapdash, and the lines mean less and less.
There’s a rush to change the mood after the death scene. The Capulets and Montagues thoughtfully shake hands — at this point the show’s political salience feels very far away — and Francis Jue’s Friar Lawrence breaks character to summon a real couple onstage (prearranged every night!) for an actual marriage or a vow renewal. Suddenly we’re part of a cheerful and supportive collective, smiling fondly on an excited pair of civilians. It’s a gesture intended to generate good will, and because they’re real people in love, it works. That high dissipated quickly for me, though. I hadn’t gone to “Romeo and Juliet” to skip the sad parts.
Romeo & Juliet Through June 28 at the Delacorte Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes.
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