Elm Shakespare Seeks To End Feuds

On Tuesday afternoon last week, a funeral was taking place in Edgerton Park.

It was for Juliet (Courtney Jamison), who was a part of the procession until she lay down on a bed prepared for her. As musicians played in the background, Juliet’s mother Lady Capulet (Samantha Dena Smith) covered her in a white sheet, then joined the tableau of grief-stricken characters onstage. Director Raphael Massie surveyed the proceedings with approval, making only minor adjustments.

“Sam,” Massie said, ​“can you have a moment after you put the sheet on her? Something with your daughter.”

They ran the scene again, and this time, Smith knelt down and placed a small kiss on Juliet’s shrouded head. It worked. It made Lady Capulet more human, not simply a noblewoman in a Shakespeare play, but a mother grieving for her child.

That tilt toward bringing out the characters’ humanity lies at the heart of Elm Shakespeare Company’s production of Romeo and Juliet, which runs at Edgerton Park until Sept. 3. It applies not only to the leads in the play — the famous star-crossed lovers whose love for each other amid the ancient tensions between their families ultimately kills them — but to its secondary characters.

Like Paris, the man Juliet’s parents want her to marry, played by Martin K. Lewis, a recent graduate of Marymount College now in his first professional role as an actor. When Lewis first read the part, he was not impressed with the character.

“Originally, I saw Paris as an oaf — a misguided, oblivious fool,” Lewis said. It’s a common reading of the character, to make Paris a stark foil for Romeo. But that was not what Massie had in mind, said Rebecca Goodheart, Elm Shakespeare’s producing director. ​“He wanted Paris to be a perfectly viable option for Juliet — just not who she loves.”

So Lewis, Massie, and Goodheart dug into Shakespeare’s text, and particularly Paris’s outburst on believing (only prematurely, as it turns out) that Juliet has died.

“Beguiled, divorced, wronged, spited, slain!,” Paris says. ​“Most detestable death, by thee beguil’d, / By cruel cruel thee quite overthrown!”

“Paris’s language is all about his loss and how unfair it is,” Lewis said. ​“Not about Juliet being dead. He feels beguiled. He feels divorced, wronged, spited, slain. It’s not fair!”

But, Lewis said, ​“I’ve come to understand that Paris is from a very specific kind of background that gives him a certain set of expectations. He’s blinded by what he thinks he’s owed.”

Finding that kind of richness is part of what the rehearsal process was about. ​“Paris is a bunch of lines that exist on a page,” Goodheart said. Lewis brought out his character’s humanity. ​“I’m remembering,” he said, ​“that Paris is a person with flaws and fears.”

And as the characters in the play become more human, so the tragedy that unfolds in Romeo and Juliet can shift from feeling inevitable — the story is a part of popular culture, whether it’s from reading the original play in school or seeing one of dozens of adaptations of it — to feeling avoidable.

“Does the world need another production of Romeo and Juliet?” Goodheart said. ​“The answer is yes if you’re telling the story of a community torn apart by violence.” She pointed out that Montagues and Capulets end their old feud with six lines at the end of the play.

“Those six lines could happen at the top of the play and four people would still be alive,” Goodheart said. ​“It takes the deaths of four people to stop it.”

And turning the knife just a little further, she pointed out that Romeo and Juliet’s plan ​“almost works.” The two teenagers almost end the feud on their own terms. Juliet convinces her nurse to forgive instead of holding on to vengeance. And Romeo tries not to fight.

So this production of Romeo and Juliet isn’t a vehicle for tugging heartstrings, but for spurring conversation.

“How do you have a community with someone who is so different from you?” Lewis said. ​“What’s evident to me is the division” — between the warring families and the people who have allied themselves with either side, to the detriment of everyone — ​“and how easily it could be solved.” For Goodheart and Lewis, that the problem isn’t solved isn’t a rumination on the unchangeable aspects of human nature, but a cautionary tale, a plea for us to avoid the same mistakes in the real world.

“They’re coming together over dead bodies,” Lewis said, ​“and it could have been avoided.”

Elm Shakespeare Company’s Romeo and Juliet runs at Edgerton Park until Sept. 3. The show starts at 8 p.m. and admission is free.