Politixia
Everybody knows “Romeo and Juliet.” Two teenagers from feuding families fall in love and secretly marry, and then a whole lot of things go horribly wrong.
And then they live happily ever after.
Wait, what?
Adapted and directed by artistic director L. Peter Callender, the new version of Shakespeare’s play that African-American Shakespeare Company is presenting at San Francisco’s Marines’ Memorial Theatre beginning May 12 takes some substantial liberties with the text. Most notably, it has a happy ending.
“I got a bit wary of the dead bodies on stage at the end of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’” Callender says. “I’m very concerned about teenage suicide in America. I’m very concerned that teenagers feel that there’s no hope, that no matter what they do, adults or the government or society just can’t do anything for them. So I just want teenagers especially to understand that there’s always hope. Don’t give up.”
Long an acclaimed Bay Area actor and director, Callender has more recently branched out into playwriting. His play “Strange Courtesies,” about the aftermath of South African apartheid, premiered streaming online with San Jose Stage Company in 2021, though the Stage’s planned live onstage production of it has been postponed till some future date.
Callender’s “Romeo and Juliet” was originally commissioned by American Stage Company in St. Petersburg, Florida, where it premiered in 2021. There it was billed “Romeo & Juliet in America (The One with the Happy Ending),” and here it takes the coyer title of simply “Romeo & Juliet*,” with simply an asterisk indicating that there’s a twist.
“When I got back here and I said, guys, this is what I want to do, ‘Romeo and Juliet (The One with a Happy Ending),’ immediately I was told, ‘Uh, Peter, no. It can’t be called a happy ending. That’s sexual.’ And I have to tell you, nobody in St. Petersburg said anything about that.”
Somehow this is only the second time that AASC has done “Romeo and Juliet” in its 29-year history. Callender directed the previous one in 2015 as well, with an all-teenage cast and its usual grim ending. He’s also performed in two productions of Shakespeare’s tragedy at California Shakespeare Theater, both times playing Juliet’s father, Capulet.
It’s hardly unprecedented for a production of “Romeo and Juliet” to be tweaked to have a happy ending. As soon as theaters reopened in the 1660s from being shut down under Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan reign, one of the first productions was a version of Shakespeare’s play tweaked by playwright James Howard to end well. Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet originally had a happy ending, as did several musical adaptations in the late 1700s.
The practice is even satirized in David Edgar’s 1980 stage adaptation of Charles Dickens’ 1839 novel “Nicholas Nickleby,” which Cal Shakes produced in 2005. In fact, Callender played the Victorian theatrical troupe leader who stages the revisionist “R&J” in that production.
“I’ve done 25 or 24 of Shakespeare’s plays, something like that,” Callender says. “And certainly, I didn’t want to rewrite Shakespeare. The plays are beautiful. I didn’t really add much at all. I took out a lot.”
He adds that he mostly used a whole lot of creative reshuffling of Shakespeare’s text to make it end well. Much of it transpires just the way it usually does, until it doesn’t.
If one of William Shakespeare’s tragedies is really, really working on stage, you know what’s going to happen but can’t help hoping that this time maybe it’ll be different. Well, this time it is. Never was a story of more “whoa” than this of Juliet and her Romeo.
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.
‘ROMEO & JULIET*’
By William Shakespeare, adapted by L. Peter Callender, presented by the African-American Shakespeare Company
When: May 12-28
Where: Marines’ Memorial Theatre, 609 Sutter St., San Francisco
Tickets: $35-$75; www.african-americanshakes.org
