Summary 
Four anonymous 1950s public-school boys enact Shakespeare's tragedy as a late-night adventure that becomes both an expression of defiance and an assertion of individuality. Sparsely staged, but sharply enacted and wisely constructed, fully capturing the heart of Shakespeare's tragedy. Movingly reveals how the students come to truly understand Romeo and Juliet and the intensity of risk and rebellion that comes with romance and true love.
Design
Directed and adapted by Joe Calarco. Set by J. Branson. Lights by Jeffrey Lowney. Sound by Lindsay Jones. Costumes by Brigid Ann Brown.
Cast
Ian Novak (Student #1), Matt Schwader (Student #2), Ian Christopher (Student #3), Michael Gotch (Student #4).
Analysis
Joe Calarco's original 1997 script - a quartet of unnamed Catholic boarding-school students hide a copy of Romeo and Juliet under the dormitory floorboards and sneak into the school chapel at night to perform the play in secrecy - modifies very little of Shakespeare's poetry and uses a good portion of the text. Calarco moreso provides an ingenuous outer framework for the doomed sixteenth-century Italian lovers from feuding families, and sheds light upon the original play's themes via its freshly conceived context: these are four young men bonding into lifelong friendships, teenagers in a breaking-all-the-rules rite of passage, rebelling against authority and by-rote scholarship and religion in an oppressive (circa 1950s) western culture; they are also performing a secret, almost ritualistic work of art, as well as exploring their coming-of-age sexual awakening. The four scholars certainly gain - and more importantly, provide - a deeper understanding and greater sympathy for the young love of Romeo and Juliet, because they are behaving in a similar fashion: defying authority, breaking rules, expressing themselves, taking risks, and embracing the forbidden. Significantly, Calarco makes the point that all four of the boys are heterosexual, although the homoerotic subtext of a male actor playing Romeo in love with a male actor playing Juliet adds even more depth.
Calarco handles the directorial chores himself, focusing the production's early moments on the environment that breeds the nameless young men's literal acting out. Calarco expertly depicts the boys - all wearing identical uniform-like sweater vests and neckties with slacks and dress shoes - subsisting within their strict school setting. Rigidly controlled and conditioned, they recite from the same textbooks, drilling mathematics lessons and reciting Latin noun declensions and verb conjugations, memorizing and thinking by rote, regurgitating answers and later saying confession in orderly ritualism. Their sudden eruption into schoolboy horseplay indicates a lack of fulfillment in both heart and soul. The boys need some passion and some abstract art, and a la Dead Poets' Society, they treat their clandestine and after-lights-out meeting in the chapel - quiet, musty, and heavy-aired with drifting incense - as a naughty game, a much-needed liberation, an adolescent experiment (as if with drugs or alcohol), and an opportunity to express themselves.
The boys, in rebellion against school and religion in general, rearrange church pews and scaffolding within the chapel to make room for their performance, scurrying about and speaking in excited stage whispers. Their initial take on performing all the varied roles from Romeo and Juliet is energetic and stylized - breathlessly precise diction and affected voices for the female characters, campy dramatics for the men, even some adolescent pelvic-thrust hip-pumps - but gradually the depth of the story takes hold, and their acting becomes more realistic as they grasp the gravity of their situation as akin to Romeo's and to Juliet's. At one point, all the boys play the same character at once, and they excitedly talk over one another and finish each other's lines in a rising crescendo indicative of their increasing collective passion. The boys light candles, use a pair of wooden boxes to use as platforms, then find a trunk to pillage for assorted props, coming up with just a nine foot by two foot ribbon of scarlet fabric. Calarco ingeniously utilizes the cloth - metaphorically representing blood, the friar's holy vestments, the nurse's beloved shawl, the poison that fells Romeo, the symbolic bond between him and Juliet - it being the only splash of color across the expanse of the darkly lit stage.
Without the context and staging of a lush Italian courtyard and the costuming and posturing of aristocracy and well-to-do family, Shakespeare's R&J plays as stripped to the core, but with exciting energy. Authority figures are minimized, portrayed briefly and with a mocking sense so as to seem ridiculous and arrogant, and most importantly, suppressive. The Capulet masque resembles a restrictive high school dance, with the participants too frightened and intimidated to move or speak to one another, much less dance. The tension is palpable, the boys playing Romeo and Juliet stealing glances at one another, the other two milling around them, deeply intoning, "Thou shalt not." The boy playing Romeo - their leader and something of an idealist and a dreamer - is the first to sense the gravity of the theatrical undertaking, and he grows more serious and more fervent with each scene. The young man who portrays Juliet seems one part class clown and one part sidekick, but he also intuits the importance of their performance, and he loses his initially higher-pitched tone, becoming more grave and adamant as the play and the night progress.
The production's critical scene involves Romeo and Juliet's marital vows, shrewdly realized by Calarco to provide a profound insight. The boys portraying Romeo and Juliet explore the reality of developing emotion in all its raw and transforming power: theirs is not a puppy-love flirtation with gazes and caresses, but a tight embrace of soulful passion, a statement of their freedom and individuality, and a defiance of family and friendship that threatens them. When they kneel and vow, then share a passionate kiss, the other two boys rebel with furious shouts, in great part against the homoerotic overtone, halting the performance and beginning a heated argument. One boy goes so far as to tear the pages from the battered copy of Romeo and Juliet, but the boys playing the Italian lovers persist, and they make a subtle and extremely effective realization that truly captures the essence of Romeo and Juliet: these two young lovers in the story are not just swept up in passion, but have found a connection that transcends social milieu, family, and even supposed friendship. They discover firsthand - as do the boys - the emotion in being criticized and reprimanded, and being told what to feel, as well as the courage and fortitude necessary to defy those commands. For these prep-school boys in a chapel overnight performing a play, as well as for Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, the unjust and vitriolic demands made upon them to sever their relationship instead only pull them closer together.
What had begun as an overnight lark - a schoolboy adventure - now resonates within the boys as their performance moves toward its conclusion. The experience impacts them all, but some to greater degrees. The boys playing Romeo and Juliet cling to one another as the school bell rings in the distance, not wanting the performance to end, not wanting the deepening of their relationship to be stopped or even suspended. But the other two boys scurry off to get ready for the next day of classes, and reluctantly, the boy playing Juliet slips out of the chapel and heads off to class as well. "Romeo" stands poignantly alone in the chapel as the lights begin to fade.
A richly deserved artistic and financial success at Apple Tree Theatre, nestled in a strip mall within a Chicago suburb on the north shore of Lake Michigan, Calarco's production was extended by popular demand, then remounted to further success in the black-box-like upstairs space at Chicago Shakespeare Theater.