What I learned. . .
The opportunity to direct Romeo and Juliet at Pioneer Theatre Company gave me the chance to solidify ideas about the play that had gotten clearer for me through a number of previous productions: the juxtaposition of comic and tragic elements; Mediterranean passion as a driving force within the play; the impact of the story on an entire town; the balcony scene as genuinely funny because of its infatuated teen-agers veracity; the velocity of events; and perhaps more than anything else, the artful cinematic lap-dissolve of one scene into the next.
It took working on the play several times to realize that at the end of almost every scene in the play, the name of the first character to speak in the next scene is spoken by one of the characters on stage. Juliet tells Friar Laurence, “Farewell, father,” when she has procured the potion from him; Lord Capulet is the first to speak in the very next scene. Romeo tells us he’ll to his “ghostly father” at the end of the balcony scene; next up is the Friar, with his soliloquy about the medicinal power of herbs. “Wisely and slow: they stumble that run fast,” cautions the Friar at the end of the scene; the next two people to enter are Mercutio and Benvolio, quite possibly on the run – one of whom definitely stumbles later in the play when he runs much too fast.
By overlapping entrances in such a way that the characters are seen the moment their names are mentioned in the preceding scene, I tried to maintain the steady pulse of the action and help make a long play seem short. It also made keeping the language flowing that much easier.
One of the great pleasures of this production was getting to direct Mark Murphey as Friar Laurence. A long-standing member of the acting company at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival; I had seen Mark play Romeo in a ground-breaking production during the 1975 season at OSF. Many of the choices in that production have resonated for me ever since attending; to work with Mark as the Friar was intimidating at first but ultimately rewarding. Much of the cast came from New York and were graduates of leading actor training programs. Mark, well-known on the west coast and a real trained-through-experience actor, was new to them, and it was secretly very satisfying to watch the east coast actors notice and then appreciate Mark’s facility with verse with something approaching awe by the time we opened. He became known -- affectionately I hasten to say -- as “Mr. Shakespeare.”