Chapter 2: Romeo and Juliet (dir. Laird Williamson), Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 2012

OREGON SHAKESPEARE’S 2012 ROMEO AND JULIET 

The following year, in 2012, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival produced its second Latinx Shakespearean production, again in the Angus Bowmer Theatre. Just as with Measure for Measure, this production incorporated notes of Spanish into the first moments of the play. After the house lights dimmed, blue lighting colored the background of the stage and two women entered from the audience. A recorded female voice, aged, English-speaking and Spanish-inflected, was heard: “En la Hermosa Verona, Dos familias, In fair Verona, two households”; the voice-over was that of the Nurse (Isabell Monk O’Connor), an Afro-Latina character with a heavy Spanish-inflected accent who was older and walked with a cane. She repeated the words of the prologue, speaking in Spanish, her voice aged and wistful. This Nurse is elderly, now blind, and recalls events long since passed. The rest of the cast entered from the wings and surrounded her, repeating the words of the prologue in English. If the Nurse was looking back on the past, the others filling onto the stage were characters from that past, and they all spoke the prologue to the audience. As the program explained, the play was reset as “a memory dream of the fabled world of the Spanish Californios.” The premise was that “Juliet’s nurse . . . [comes] back to revisit this place which held tragedy in her life. . . . It’s not so much that she tells the story but she conjures it up and the people will start coming out of the woodwork so to speak, as if they have been revived from the past.” And that past was seen not through the eyes of the now-blind Nurse, but told through the voices of the characters who lived it, young and old, with a range of languages, accents, and inflections. (p.71)