Review: ROMEO AND JULIE: LOVE IS A FIRE at Santa Monica Playhouse

To a director, any bare stage must be 12 kinds of daunting, especially when at the end of a journey, you’re supposed to populate it with something like ROMEO AND JULIET, a property that everyone, everyone, EVERYONE already knows. A meaningful experience on the proverbial “wooden O” should never be dependent on the scenery or the props, the visual opulence of a given scene. Not when it’s Shakespeare. Not when the actors have a take and know what they’re doing.

I muse on the theatrical equivalent of a blank page because, for the bulk of ROMEO AND JULIET: LOVE IS A FIRE, directed by Neno Pervan, the Santa Monica Playhouse stage is completely empty of anything other than performers. There are no chairs, no beds, no balconies, nada. When actors sit, they’re on the floor. The sole exception is a single table atop and over which Romeo Dancer (played by Chris Smith) and Juliet Dancer (Laura Ann Smyth) cavort in a steamy prolog and epilog. When these performers leave the stage, away goes the table. (More about Smith and Smyth anon). Large segments of the action take place between a single actor on stage talking to another who is standing in one of the theater’s two aisles. The actors are costumed and, frequently, they wear decorative masks, but otherwise this production is the barest of bones. 

Now, ROMEO AND JULIET is, as a Disney talking teapot might warble, a tale as old as time. Unless one is, say, reconceiving it and grafting the music of Pat Benatar onto it, you’re probably not breaking any new ground. In his program introduction, adaptor and director Pervan – whose Il Dolce Theatre Company is co-producing along with the SMP - says his intent is so “create our own Verona” to “try and find out why” the warring Montagues and Capulets hate each other and why the children of their houses have to die.

Well and good. Alas, Pervan’s production takes no risks and provides not a shred of insight - within the text or outside it - why this tale unfolds as it does. A few textual adjustments notwithstanding, Pervan’s production is standard issue ROMEO AND JULIET, fire or chill. Why do these families hate each other? The production offers not a single clue. Why do the titular lovers have to die? Well, not to get too literal, but it appears to have something to do with the fact that Romeo killed Tybalt, got himself banished, then Juliet cooked up a plot with Friar Lawrence but Romeo didn’t get the Friar’s message in time to understand that Juliet was not really dead. Period. End of story. Write it in the stars.

Pervan does make some dramatic choices, many of them of the oddball variety. The addition of Romeo Dancer and Juliet Dancer, for a start. Are they supposed to be the grown-to-maturity dream incarnations of the play’s Romeo and Juliet, now free to intertwine, embrace and canoodle – sometimes passing a cigarette back and forth - as openly as they damned well please? Incidentally, the only reason we know that Smith and Smyth are supposed to be incarnations our R & J is not because the production identifies or explains them in any way, but because the program labels them as such. These two actor-dancers bear not a shred of a resemblance to their counterparts who are played by Annalisa Cochrane and Raquel Justice, a white woman and a Black woman respectively.

Weird thing #2…why does Alan Corvaia’s Friar Lawrence deliver large chunks of his lines in Spanish? We get that the Friar is impassioned, that he often thinks Romeo is acting like a petulant dolt, that he wants the Montague-Capulet feud to end, that he finds the sprouting of a plant in his shoe to be a thing of beauty, but it would be cool to understand what the man is actually saying.

If these seem like critical nits to pick, well, there’s not much else about this ROMEO AND JULIET that is engaging. A small cast and a ton of role doubling keeps us on our toes. To distinguish Juliet’s suitor the County Paris from her fiery cousin Tybalt, for example, Gavin Mulcahy sports a half mask that resembles a prop from THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA.  The majority of the company members and of Il Dolce are current students, faculty or alumni of Loyola Marymount University.

The two lovers have some nice moments, apart and together. Justice in particular takes Juliet’s early petulance (very teen-agey, befitting a schoolgirl who has never been in love) into something deeper and more adult the deeper into the soup more Juliet goes. Cochrane partners her well and is convincing both as a besotted lover and, after Tybalt’s death, as a desperate young man alone and in need of help.

As effective as they are, Cochrane and Justice are not enough to rescue this production.

ROMEO AND JULIET: LOVE IS A FIRE continues through November 18 at 1211 4th St. Santa Monica.

Photo of Annalisa Cochrane and Raquel Justice by Radan Popovic.

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