EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: Ellen & Joffa Dale, Michael & Virginia Ross, Sharon & Barclay Simpson, and Jay Yamada

PRODUCERS: Erin Jaeb & Kevin Kelly, Jean Simpson, Frank & Carey Starn, and Buddy & Jodi Warner

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SEASONPARTNERS

PRESENTING PARTNERS

JONAThAN MOSCONE Artistic Director SuSIE FAlK MAnAging Director

C A L I F O R N I A S H A K E S P E A R E T H E A T E R

PRESENTS

By William ShakeSpeare

DirecteD By Shana cooper

July 3–28, 2013

BrunS memorial amphitheater, orinDa

SET DESIGNER DANIEl OSTlING

COSTUME DESIGNER ChRISTINE CROOK

LIGHTING DESIGNER lAP ChI Chu

COMPOSER/SOUND DESIGNER PAul JAMES PRENDERGAST

RESIDENT DRAMATURG PhIlIPPA KEllY

VOCAL/TEXT COACH NANCY CARlIN

RESIDENT FIGHT DIRECTOR DAVE MAIER

MOVEMENT ERIKA ChONG ShuCh

STAGE MANAGER CORRIE BENNETT

ASSISTANT STAGE MANAGER lAXMI KuMARAN

ASSOCIATE SET DESIGNER NINA BAll

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR AARON SNOOK

ASSISTANT LIGHTING DESIGNER KRISTA SMITh

PRODUCTION ASSISTANT ChRISTINA hOGAN

CAST

BENVOLIO, LADY CAPULET, ENSEMBLE ARWEN ANDERSON

JULIET REBEKAh BROCKMAN

ROMEO DAN ClEGG

TYBALT, PARIS, ENSEMBLE NICK GABRIEl

FRIAR, LORD CAPULET, PETER, ENSEMBLE DAN hIATT

NURSE, PRINCE, ENSEMBLE DOMENIQuE lOZANO

MERCUTIO, APOTHECARY, ENSEMBLE JOSEPh J. PARKS

ThERE WIll BE ONE 15-MINuTE INTERMISSION.

SEASON uNDERWRITERS

Partial support for open captioning provided by Theatre Development Fund

In this play, everyone, even a presumably contemplative man of God, hurtles forward in the heat of the moment, with retrospection revealing paths that might more prudently have been taken.

to nail her into place: “fettle your fine joints ’gainst Thursday next,/To go with Paris to Saint Peter’s Church,/Or I will drag thee on a hurdle thither.” But, unbeknownst to him, love has already carried his daughter away, and no buckets of his famed wealth can hold her. Subsequently abandoned by her family, her nurse, and her newly-dead lover—even by the trusted friar, who “reassures” her that she can still choose to spend the rest of her life in a nunnery—Juliet takes a knife and plunges it in her heart. This is when it’s most fully evident that Juliet is only 13: too young to know that there can ever be a sequel to her wrenching story of love.

Who knows whether, if Juliet had confided in her father, she might have won his approval for her marriage to Romeo? Certainly Capulet is quite sanguine, even avuncular, about Romeo’s disguised presence at his ball. Juliet is Capulet’s only surviving child, and he declares quite strongly to his chosen suitor, Paris, that marriage should not be foisted upon his precious daughter: He wants her to be both ready and happy. But, as a child still living in the world of absolutes, Juliet has gone ahead and married without her parents’ knowledge, affecting her own secret act of separation. The subsequent succession of events that leads to Romeo’s banishment leaves her in acute distress, which her father seeks to alleviate by granting her the excitement of a socially ambitious marriage. It’s only in refusing his gift that Juliet brings down his wrath, and the tragedy unrolls while we watch helplessly.

“Oh, Juliet!” we might say, “Why could you not have waited?” The answer is simple—again, because she’s only 13. As the nurse’s charge, Juliet already understands sexuality, even if she has not experienced it. When immature Romeo calls her a holy shrine at the ball, he means it as a flirtation. But she takes it as a promise: “This bud of love, by summer’s ripening breath,/May prove a beauteous flower when next

we meet,” she says soon thereafter, and it is she who sets her own script and candidly edits his: “Oh swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon…” Juliet, in effect, creates the strongly-rooted lover she needs Romeo to be. By the end of Shakespeare’s play, Romeo—cut off from Mercutio and separated by banishment from all his old swashbuckling friends—does indeed become her utterly devoted lover: prepared to leave the world rather than live without her. This rash courage is embodied in his words, ‘‘Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on/The dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary bark/Here’s to my love!” In giving Romeo this extended metaphor, Shakespeare was drawing on the greatest motif of courage and audacity known to his world at the time: that of sea-faring. Being an explorer in these decades must have required extraordinary valor. And so, as the play rushes toward its end, we envisage Romeo, the newly intrepid explorer, doomed—but also ready and willing—to pay a terrible price for his passion. On less tempestuous waters, passion might have been given the chance to quell, lapping into the quieter waters of affection (or disregard). But this lover doesn’t have the chance to live on and inevitably change: He is thrust forward on the seas of passion to be dashed upon the rocks.

It’s not only Juliet who suffers from a lack of parental guidance. Who knows how Romeo’s rash journey might have been tempered had he been

able to approach his father? Lord Montague—largely absent from the play and from his son’s thoughts—makes an appearance only to ask what all the fuss of the young men’s fight is about and later, in absentia, to grieve at his son’s death. The Friar is Romeo’s acknowledged father-figure; and, as such, he has a responsibility as both religious confessor and in locus parentis. He makes a choice to perform the marriage ceremony in the hope that this will heal the family feud: and so it might be wondered whether he is, in the end, a worse father to Romeo than the negligent Montague. It seems so with the benefit of hindsight—but in this play, everyone, even a presumably contemplative man of God, hurtles forward in the heat of the moment, with retrospection revealing paths that might more prudently have been taken.

As director Shana Cooper observes, Romeo and Juliet is not a story about the stars controlling our destinies—it’s about the urges and vulnerabilities of being human. This scenario is played out in the complexities of parent/child miscommunication; in this respect, the far-off dusty heat of 16th-century feuding Verona is no different from the world of today. Parenting begets both hope and regret, but one thing we know for sure: Children will separate and form their own lives, and the most controlling of parents are, in the end, bystanders to the passage of their children’s hearts.

Repeatedly (even obsessively) throughout his 20-year writing career, Shakespeare explored the theme of father/daughter separation. At the age of 27, as he began writing Romeo and Juliet, the dramatist was already a father of three. Hamnet, a twin, would die in 1595 of a fever; left with two daughters, Shakespeare would for the rest of his life favor Susannah, his first-born. Judith, the remaining twin, like many a lesser-loved daughter, would continue to displease her father, marrying late and unsuitably, and suffering the ignominy of being partially disinherited at his death.

It might seem remarkable that a father who so favored one daughter would base so many plays around the trauma arising from either a father’s unreasonable preference or a father’s unwillingness to let go. But it made for good drama, since in his time a girl was her father’s property until her marriage, and he had the right to choose her husband. A father’s choice of bridegroom was in effect the final—and most important—choice he’d ever make on his daughter’s behalf. Regardless of his own family

circumstances, as a playwright Shakespeare saw the dramatic potential to be derived from this family dynamic, and he drew on it and worried at it in tragedies, comedies, and romances. Only once in his career, in The Tempest, would Shakespeare portray a father/daughter separation that goes according to plan—and even in this context, a dismayed Prospero finds that although he might bring the perfect bridegroom literally to his daughter’s “door,” the mysteries of passion transcend a father’s power to control them, even by magic.

“Younger than she are early mothers made,” observes Juliet’s mother in Romeo and Juliet, “Thus was I myself.” Suckled and nurtured not by her cold, distant mother but by a practical and bawdy nurse, at 13 Juliet is both an innocent upper-class young girl and the product of her nurse’s hands-on determination in the face of life’s complexities. Even at this young age, Juliet is ready to separate from her parents—and she does, by falling in love with Romeo. Confronted with her reluctance to accept his own choice of suitor, her father brutally attempts

arriving too lateREPAR ATION,S EPA R AT I O N,

By RESIdENT dRAmATuRg

PhiliPPa Kelly

At 13 Juliet is both an innocent u p p e r - c l a s s young girl and the product of her nurse’s hands-on determination in the face of life’s c o m p l e x i t i e s .

See how she leans her cheek upon her hand! O that I were a glove upon that hand, That I might touch that cheek!

Romeo, honey: You had me at “But soft!”

For her part, Juliet can also turn one’s internal organs all warm and runny. In a world where most relationships—and more than 50% of marriages—are statistically doomed to utter failure, who doesn’t want their beloved to look them square in the eye and declare without irony:

My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep; the more I give thee, The more I have, for both are infinite!

Infinite love? I don’t care who you are—that’s good stuff right there! Juliet: Sign! Me! Up!

The play’s beautiful words have also been incorporated into a favorite national mythology: the romanticized vision of the Kennedy family in the 1960s. Senator Robert Kennedy cemented the idea at the 1964 Democratic National Convention when, after a 22-minute standing ovation as he walked out on the stage, he introduced a film about the late president. His voice quavering with emotion, Senator Kennedy proclaimed of his fallen brother the same words Juliet exclaims about Romeo before her wedding night:

…And when [he] shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun.

The beautiful memorial further affixed itself into the national subconscious when RFK was assassinated in 1968, on the night of his victory in the California democratic primary. This same year, Franco Zeffirelli filmed his famous version of Romeo and Juliet, which earned $14.5 million dollars upon its release in 1969.

To get lost in the beauty of Shakespeare’s text, however, is to lose sight of his context. Juliet’s words are spoken just before she is informed that Romeo has bloodily killed her cousin Tybalt. They also anticipate, as if spoken by a seer, the death of both Juliet and Romeo. Just as the assassination of the Kennedy brothers was a triumph for hatred over progress and new ideas, Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy is a bitter paean to the Power of Hate.

The play’s opening lines immediately announce that love is doomed before it starts by the collective hate spewed forth from the Capulets and the Montagues. Love is not the sentiment first illustrated on stage. Hate is the first powerful emotion voiced when young male servants and family members of both houses happen

upon each other in the street and begin a sword brawl. Benvolio’s call for peace is met by Tybalt’s proclamation:

What, drawn and talk of peace? I hate the word As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee…

The young men of the houses of Montague and Capulet have a common denominator: These boys love to hate. Further, they seem to conflate the two emotions. Romeo’s remarks on the brawl seem tied to his own unrequited love for Rosalind, from which he suffers a crushing depression of Hamlet-like proportions at the beginning of the play. Just as Tybalt passionately luxuriates in his hatred of the Montagues, so Romeo wallows with as great a passion in love’s dark side: love unreturned, love scorned, love denied.

Juliet, too, recognizes the conflation of love and hate in this world when she is informed of Romeo’s true identity:

Nurse: His name is Romeo, a Montague, The only son of your great enemy. Juliet: My only love sprung from my only hate!

Love cannot take true root in this play. It is sown in the soil of hate and destined to whither on the vine. As the Prince informs the warring families at the play’s finale:

Where be these enemies? Capulet, Montague, See what a scourge is laid upon your hate, That heaven finds a means to kill your joys with love.

Although the families vow to end their war, erect memorials to their fallen children, and observe “a glooming peace,” it is just as easy to imagine a sequel to the play, wherein the parties’ grief leads to blame, and further eruptions of bloody hatred. After all, previous attempts to end the violence were to absolutely no avail. When Capulet tells Tybalt to leave Romeo in peace at the masque, Tybalt obeys for the moment, but ruefully mutters:

I will withdraw. But this intrusion shall, Now seeming sweet, convert to bitt’rest gall.

A day later, Tybalt picks a fight with the Montagues and ends up dead. Capulet’s conciliatory words fall on deaf ears because the families have nursed and weaned their children on mutual hatred. Mere words are no competition for years of being nourished with the milk-blood of contemptuous loathing; and loathing kills love. So is Shakespeare saying hate is stronger than love? If so, he was on to a depressing conclusion confirmed by our 21st-century psychology. Some light, however, exists at the end of the tunnel. “Bad Is Stronger Than Good,” tries to ameliorate its own findings by noting:

…the greater power of bad may itself be a good

Continued on Page 19.

Hatred is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die, so the saying goes. Shakespeare seems to literalize this idea through his use of poison as a device to defeat love in Romeo and Juliet. Hoping to escape their parents’ mutual hatred and find freedom for their mutual adoration, both Juliet and Romeo drink a poisonous substance: Juliet to induce a death-like coma, hoping her “death” will allow life for her new-found love for Romeo. Likewise, Romeo dies by ingesting liquid poison in his grief over Juliet’s alleged death. Upon awakening to finding his corpse, Juliet kisses Romeo’s still-warm lips, crying,

Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end. O churl, drunk all, and left no friendly drop To help me after? I will kiss thy lips; Haply some poison yet doth hang on them, To make me die with a restorative.

The poison of which she speaks is hatred; the actual liquid is merely the instrument through which hatred prevails. During the course of their young lives, the children of Capulet and Montague are force-fed a steady diet from the cup of their parents’ poisonous enmity. The children die from their parents’ hate and so hate triumphs over love.

Shakespeare’s 16th-century depiction of hate conquering love seems confirmed by 21st-century psychology. In 2001, the Review of General Psychology published the results of a formal study entitled “Bad is Stronger Than Good,” which contain the following depressing findings:

Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good…Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones…Hardly an exception can be found. Taken together, these findings suggest that bad is stronger than good, as a general principle across a broad image of psychological phenomena. (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Findenauer, and Vohs, p. 362)

The authors’ conclusion is as dismal as Shakespeare’s tragedy: “In our review, we have found bad to be stronger than good in a disappointingly relentless pattern…The lack of exceptions suggest how basic and powerful is the greater power of bad.”

But wait…isn’t Romeo and Juliet allegedly about the power of love? The play’s reputation as an illustration of the power of love is a staple of our collective cultural consciousness. Reputation and truth, however, can be very different animals.

Many first encounter Romeo and Juliet in an English class while at an age similar to the star-crossed lovers—when individuals are most susceptible to the idea that it is somehow noble or romantic to adore one so ferociously that death seems a small price to pay for True Love. The mark Romeo and Juliet’s poetry leaves on hormonally-charged young minds makes an indelible imprint on our hearts. Even as I type that last sentence, I can hear a piano and stringed instruments cue the theme from Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film version to underscore Shakespeare’s words, luring me back to my 13-year-old self, and the conventional wisdom that Shakespeare’s teen lovers exemplify love in its purest, most holy form: Their forbidden love conquered their family’s hate! They loved despite the odds! Their love was so strong that not even death could keep them apart!

The play’s reputation is helped tremendously by the fact that Shakespeare did indeed outdo himself in the poetic beauty of the love sentiments expressed in the text. After all, who wouldn’t want his or her beloved to say the things of them that Romeo so exuberantly gushes over Juliet:

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east and Juliet is the sun!... The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven Would through the airy region stream so bright That birds would sing and think it were not night

Continued from page 13.

thing. Moreover, good can still triumph in the end by force of numbers. even though a bad event may have a stronger impact than a comparable good event, many lives can be happy by virtue of having far more good than bad events. (362)

That’s some hope. and yet it rings with the same remorseful attempt at making the best of things that the Chorus embodies when they conclude the play with:

A glooming peace this morning with it brings; The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head. Go hence to have more talk of these sad things. So shall be pardoned, and some punished; For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

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WHo is BRieFlY WaYlaiD BY THe salTY meRCUTio.

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68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

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BY Cal SHaKeS aSSoCIate aRtISt Dan HIatt, WHo plaYS tHe FRIaR anD loRD Capulet In romeo & JUliet

solutions can be found online at www.calshakes.org/articles.

across1. TTT by j. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers which begins, “Well where oh where can my baby be?/ The lord took her away from me”9. City by the Bay, for short13. Feeling of well-being14. othello, for one15. laura Petrie’s hubby18. TTT by jan and Dean which begins, “i was cruisin’ in my sting Ray late one night...”20. sheet music abbr.21. opposite of “nary” in the ozarks22. G-man eliot23. martini maker24. Walnut Creek to Concord dir.25.Itslastpassengerflightwas10/24/200327. TTT by mark Dinning which begins, “That fateful night/ the car was stalled upon the railroad track”30. buco34. Pro-gun grp.35. With “lingus,” irish airline36. Romeo and Juliet, or any theme entry in this puzzle41. TTT (sort of) by johnny Ray which begins, “if your sweetheart sends a letter of good bye...”42. Guns n’ Roses’ Rose43. not this or that44. “ Gratia artis”—mGm motto

Down 1. swan woman of myth2. Hungarian violinist leopold and others3. Fixes a kitty4. Honorary degree oz bestows on the scarecrow (Doctor of Thinkology)5. Polka-dot jersey wearer in Tour de France, for short6. ayatollah Khomeini’s land7. qua non8. 2011 Titus Andronicus director joel9. Dallas inst. of higher learning10. Fake11. City 20 miles east of l.a.12. sports venue15. smokey the Bear’s headwear16. Cantankerous17. Jacques is Alive and Well and Living in Paris19. Chicago wintertime26. one of Tennessee ernie Ford’s sixteen28. Football position29. mother of pearl31. Popular Russian vodka, familiarly32. mex. miss33. Pearl Harbor island36. make lace37.Commonfilelettersfollowingadot38. mirror shapes in leko stage lights39. Teutonic country in eur.40. ancient messenian city44. Recent Chevrolet models46. sensory threshold47. Terror weapon for short48. vietnamese chess star le Quang49. shrek, for one50. Hard of hearing response51. Dawn Chong55. massaged56. Time-payment plan of old57. Calm part of hurricane58. Big toy co. schwarz60. jump the tracks62. newt children63. Hollers64. Francis Ford’s director daughter, familiarly66. eat it with lox or schmear67. What you may become from eating too many 66-Downs71. see 56-across72. “The Terrible” tsar73. architect saarinen75. Former world pwr.78. Certain mantras79. name ending for many a regional theater80. landon, defeated by FDR in 1936

45. TTT by Ray Peterson which begins, “laura and Tommy were lovers/ he wanted to give her everything”52.RichardCrookback’snumericalsuffix53. French snow54. “eureka!”55. Tachometer unit56. With 71-Down, TTT by the shangri-las, which begins, “i met him at the candy store/ Turned around and smiled at me, you get the picture? Yes, we see!”59. see 60-across60. With 59-across, park restriction61. City near Phoenix62. TTT by everly Brothers which begins “on a weekend pass i wouldn’t have had time/ To get home and marry that baby of mine”65. Craiglist abbr.68. 22-across org.69. stat for lincecum70. Ron Howard role74. Ghraib76. Cable network mogul Turner77. Rule by which “everything evens out in the end”81. ’60s university radical org.82. actors neeson or vincent83. Behavior in a 36-across, often84. stallone and Taming of the Shrew’s Christopher85. Dire straits’ frontman mark