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At Ashland’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival, director Nataki Garrett has brought a fresh spin to Romeo & Juliet, which is playing at Angus Bowmer Theatre through Oct. 15.
Like many productions that Garrett has spearheaded as OSF’s artistic director, it’s a contemporary update. This production retains the original dialogue, but the setting is a houseless encampment under a bridge in a West Coast city, complete with a hip-hop soundtrack and parallels between the Capulet and Montague blood feud and today’s ever stronger social divisions.
Originally from Oakland, Garrett connected to the source material in middle school English (Mercutio’s final monologue was her first choice to recite in class). As an adult, she came to appreciate the play’s musicality, likening it to the jazz and soul and hip-hop she grew up with.
Since the production premiered, it has become Garrett’s Ashland swan song. In May, she resigned as artistic director and interim executive director of OSF, following an emergency fundraising campaign to save the company’s summer season.
As the first Black female artistic director in OSF’s 88-year history, Garrett’s tenure was marked by racism, death threats and complaints about her productions being too modern and diverse for a majority white audience. Her detractors would have been shocked by the audience at the matinee I attended; the crowd laughed at every witty turn of phrase, applauded between each scene, and gave the production a standing ovation.
Attendees came hundreds of miles in some cases (a woman from San Anselmo, Calif., remarked on how the stage could visually pass for Oakland, Los Angeles, or Portland, with its variety of digital backdrops).
Garrett has staged a compelling production, but it wouldn’t have been possible without the talents of a terrific, largely BIPOC cast. Though not a hard and fast rule (the Nurse and Montague, both white, serve as counterexamples), lighter-skinned characters tend to be more privileged. Erica Sullivan’s Prince comes to mind.
The Prince is just one character who inverts the Elizabethan tradition of female characters being played by male actors. Several traditionally male characters (Balthazar, Mercutio and Capulet, among them) are here played by female or nonbinary actors.
That makes for a curious irony when lines of gendered dialogue are retained, such as Tyrone Wilson’s Friar Lawrence admonishing Jeremy Gallardo’s Romeo not to cry “womanish” tears. Even more ironically, as the scene progresses, Friar Lawrence can’t hold back his own tears.
As Romeo, Gallardo is like an overgrown puppy: excitable and physically affectionate with everyone around him (leading to a running gag of Mercutio recoiling from his breath).
As the story turns darker, Gallardo retains that expressive nature, but is also shown in the fetal position and screaming in anguish. Jada Alston Owens as Juliet builds up to similarly explosive fury, but starts out quiet and reserved, playing the daughter of Capulet as a sensitive artist who paints her space above her parents’ ramshackle trailer.
Garrett, of course, is an artist in her own right. She may be leaving Ashland, but with Romeo & Juliet, she’s leaving on a high note, biting her thumb at all her detractors in style.
SEE IT: Romeo & Juliet plays at the Angus Bowmer Theatre, 20 E Main St., Ashland, 541-482-2111, osfashland.org. Shows through Oct. 15. $45.