Originally published in The Towerlight October 26, 2009.

Photo by Alan Dovell

Swords clash. Families feud. Teens find forbidden love. This isn’t a prime time drama or a new movie. It’s one of the most popular love stories in history.

“Romeo and Juliet,” which will premiere Friday night in the Center for the Arts Mainstage Theatre, is one of William Shakespeare’s most frequently performed plays, telling the story of two teens from rival Italian families who fall in love and meet a tragic end.

According to director Steven Satta, an associate professor of theatre arts, the theatre department has a practice of doing a Shakespearean work every two years, “and it was time for Shakespeare,” he said.

“Romeo and Juliet” is also part of the theatre department’s outreach program. The cast works with middle and high school students to teach them how they worked on the play the students are reading in class.

Written more than 400 years ago, the play never went out of style, according to Satta. Many of the themes and characters are still used today’s films, literature and television.

“It’s like ‘Desperate Housewives.’ There’s sex and violence and intrigue and romance,” he said.

However, Satta said he wanted to give Towson’s production a unique spin because, as he said, the crew “didn’t want to do a museum piece.”
“While sometimes historical accuracies can be fascinating, they don’t usually make for exciting theatre,” he said.
To that end, Satta said some changes were made. The crew tweaked the costumes and added live music and choreography to the play’s classic party scene, where Romeo and Juliet first meet. While he admitted to being a fan of Baz Luhrmann’s modernized 1996 film adaptation, “Romeo + Juliet,” Satta said he used the Showtime series “The Tudors” as a jumping-off point for Towson’s interpretation of the play.
That show “took a historical period and modified it so that the modern audience seeing it would have a visceral experience of what those people and those events meant in their time,” he said. “So in their time, big puffy pumpkin pants looked sexy. They look funny to us.”
But in consideration of the students coming as part of the outreach program, Satta said he kept it anchored in Shakespeare’s time.
“We decided to keep it somewhat conservative because we wanted to ensure … that the kids were seeing onstage… what they had been reading and what they were being taught; so we didn’t want to adapt ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ We wanted to do ‘Romeo and Juliet,’” he said.
Another element of keeping it fresh was the swordplay. Satta enlisted Lewis Shaw, a choreographer and prop maker who has worked on Broadway productions. Shaw planned the fights and made all of the heavy steel props the characters wield.
Senior theatre major Ryan Airey, who plays Mercutio, is involved in several of the play’s key fights. He trained in stage combat before getting the part.
“It’s been great working with everybody and fighting with everybody and learning more,” he said.
Casting the play in the spring was also a challenge because Satta had what he called an “embarrassment of riches.”
“We had a lot of students who were more than ready in terms of their talent and their skills to approach the roles,” he said.
Ultimately, the iconic roles went to senior Jon Kevin Lazarus as Romeo and junior Lauren Baker as Juliet. Both students are theatre majors.
Lazarus said he remembers reading through the play (as Romeo, even) in his high school English class.
“Coming back to it now, you’re at a very different place in your life than you were back then, so you start to get whole new understandings of some of the things that just meant different things to you,” he said.
Baker said she relates very strongly to Juliet, and that it wasn’t hard to “find” Juliet in her.
“The challenge now is to go back to the script and look at that she’s saying and find these deeper meanings and find the different facets of her character – that she’s not some lovesick little girl who’s just airy and doesn’t have a care in the world. She’s a warrior,” Baker said.
Baker added that taking on an iconic role like Juliet comes with a big pair of shoes to fill.
“Juliet says some of the most gorgeous lines written by William Shakespeare, and everybody knows them, no matter what country, no matter what age. ‘That which we call a Rose By any other word would smell as sweete.’ Everybody knows that, so everybody will be judging me on that,” she said.
“It’s a little scary, but it’s more just this challenge. I can’t wait for people to see my interpretation and hopefully, they’ll love it.”
Satta said he hopes Towson’s production casts the Shakespearean classic in a new light.
“I hope the audience is excited by what they see,” he said. I hope that they recognize the people and the behaviors and the problems and the struggles onstage as things that they encounter in their own life and see in modern day.”