ROMEO BY TELEPHONE

“And Juliet is the sun? Or the moon?” In a clever take on the game of telephone (or Chinese whispers), the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, an experimental theatre company, asked some their friends to recite what they remembered from Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet". The unedited transcripts of these phonecalls now form the script for a charming new show at The Kitchen in downtown New York.

Performed in the tight Elizabethan diction of a bad Shakespeare company, these monologues include every painful pause and stammer of the recorded originals. Robert M. Johanson and Anne Gridley are both amusing as the doomed lovers. Johanson's emphatic, sneering delivery includes a healthy spray of saliva (or its promise), while Gridley's tremulous pout is accompanied by an ecstatic warble. "I’m not sure if they banged or not", she says, eyebrows knit together, forefinger in the air, in a particularly humorous recollection. (Their own half-baked bits of Shakespeare were included in the transcripts.)

In these shaky memories, "Romeo and Juliet" is refracted as a whodunnit. No one can remember which character died first, or who killed whom with what weapon, or why Juliet took the seemingly fatal sleeping potion in the first place. Equally fun are the brave forays into character analysis–Paris was so boring; wasn't there a bumbling nurse?; Mercutio was certainly gay–and famous speeches gone awry.

These telephone monologues include discourses on love, cynicism, Anna Nicole Smith, the attacks of September 11th, masturbation, divorce, Puerto Ricans and hipsters. Long pauses, obsessive recalculations and mindless chatter of unedited speech are transformed here into art–funny, but also unnerving. The longer someone talks, the stranger and sadder the narrative gets.

This production is not flawless. The overdone Shakespearean pronunciation is entertaining at first but soon gets tired. And the unedited transcript is a double-edged sword (or swwwooohhhhrd, as the actors say it). The second act could certainly be tighter. But a surprisingly poetic ending, which I won't spoil, makes things right.

The Nature Theater of Oklahoma's "Romeo and Juliet" is playing at The Kitchen in New York until January 16th

~ ARIEL RAMCHANDANI

Picture Credit: Paula Court