Contributed photo
The 7 Fingers in "Dual Reality."
The 7 Fingers, an acrobatic and theatrical company, was about to begin its performance of Arts & Ideas’ Duel Reality, a circus-like retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, when a fight appeared to break out in the audience.
The ushers had split the crowd down the middle and given half the attendees a red wristband while the other half received blue. The problem: two audience members noticed that a third “audience member” was seated in the wrong section, wearing a blue wristband in the red half. They asked him to move. He resisted. Just as the audience started to get nervous that a real physical altercation was occurring, all would-be combatants ran up onto the stage. The show had already begun.
Duel Reality is a play on Dual Reality, and may be a nod to the red-pill-blue-pill scene in The Matrix, in which the protagonist is offered a choice between returning to the world as he knows it or uncovering the truth of his existence. But in The 7 Fingers show, Shakespeare’s Montagues (red) and Capulets (blue) don’t represent truth and fantasy. It’s less of a dual and more of a split reality, where each family only has half the story. To form a true picture of reality, they need to unite.
The 7 Fingers, directed by Shana Carroll and starring Daniela Corradi, Andreas De Ryck, Aerial Emery, Marco Ingaramo, Gerardo Gutiérrez, Michelle Hernandez, Kalani June, Einar Kling-Odencrants, Andrew Price, Santiago Rivera, Arata Urawa, and Danny Vrijsen, stunned and dazzled with dangerous acrobatic feats and graceful dancing. They took an extremely wordy story and stripped it down to its bare essentials, to tell the story of Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers through movement.
After the three “audience members” leaped on stage, they were joined by the rest of the cast, all in either red or blue shirts. Eventually, a black-and-white clad referee broke up the stage fighting, only to turn it into a competition. Acrobats climbed two tall poles dangling from the ceiling, performing flips and handstands and holding themselves perpendicular to the stage. In a final fearsome act, both the Montague and the Capulet performers dropped head first down the pole, stopping themselves within inches of the stage. Amidst cheers and screams from the audience, the referee measured the distance between each head and the floor, and declared the Capulets the winners.
A series of circus acts followed. A Montague and a Capulet competed in juggling bats and balls. A Capulet girl performed seemingly impossible feats with hula hoops, keeping multiple hoops spinning at once and simultaneously holding other hoops up for the other performers to flip through.
The acrobatics and tricks were interspersed with snatches of dialogue from the original play, mostly from confrontation scenes. “Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?” asked one actor. In general, though, the dialogue was less convincing than the sheer raw physicality of the actors’ movements. Sometimes actions speak louder than words.
Meanwhile, Romeo and Juliet came together and were pulled apart, either by invisible fingers or by the very real hands of their families. In the rare moments they snatched to themselves, their dancing conveyed the burgeoning passion of their romance. When Romeo held Juliet over his head in a handstand, only to flip her upside down and right side up again, it both represented the effect he had on her world and displayed the trust between them as effectively as any dialogue.
At one point, chains dropped from the ceiling and the Montagues and Capulets used them to pull the lovers apart and into the air. The chains represented the constraints that their families had put on the pair, tethering them to their surnames rather than letting them follow their desires.
In another fight scene, a Capulet (presumably Tybalt, Juliet’s hot-headed cousin) faced up against a Montague (presumably Mercutio, Romeo’s reckless friend, not really a Montague but one in all but name). Rather than fighting with swords as in the original, they fought with their skills. They bounced up and down on a seesaw, flinging each other into the air and performing increasingly complicated flips and twists.
The performers remove their red and blue clothing.
Tybalt fell to the ground, and Juliet sobbed over his body. But rather than attempting to fake her death, she simply removed her blue shirt, revealing a black undergarment. In an incredibly touching scene, the other characters followed suit, and the mass of red and blue turned into a sea of black. Tybalt and Mercutio were the last to remove their clothing, uniting the families under a common color and effectively burying the hatchet.
The audience members were then encouraged to remove their respective wristbands, throwing them at the stage. Romeo appeared and climbed up onto a swing that descended from the ceiling, and Juliet was flung into the air, where he caught her. The play ended with a song and dance, and the audience leapt into a standing ovation.
“We changed the ending, because who needs a tragedy these days?” said one actor. Who indeed, when it turns out a few flips, tricks, and turns can unite us all under a common reality?