By JAMES D. WATTS JR. Scene Writer on Aug 27, 2010, at 5:08 PM Updated on 8/27 at 5:08 PM
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So a bunch of Shakespeareans walk into a bar.
It sounds like a set-up for a bad joke, but it’s not. It just describes what happened Tuesday night at Elote Café & Catering, when the performers of what is billed as the Tulsa Shakespeare Festival staged its production of “Romeo and Juliet” in and around the wrestling ring that fills one end of the restaurant’s bar.
Now it’s REALLY starting to sound like a joke. But, again, it’s not.
Saturday is the official debut of the Tulsa Shakespeare Festival, an event created by local actor Justin McKean, who directs “Romeo and Juliet” and plays the role of Capulet, Juliet’s father.
The sort of festival atmosphere McKean would like to have won’t be in evidence this Saturday at the H.A. Chapman Green at Sixth and Main streets in downtown Tulsa.
But – to judge by what was presented Tuesday night at Elote – the “Shakespeare” part was in pretty good shape.
Some caveats: A restaurant is rarely the best place to experience any kind of theater, much less Shakespeare. Actors have to compete with the general noise of people serving and consuming food, and the conversations of those who came to eat and drink rather than watch live actors attempt to perform one of the most famous plays ever written.
I sat next to such a couple, who were entranced by the silent films of amateur lucha libre battles being shown on TV screens behind the bar and did not so much as glance at the very real performers less than a dozen feet away from them, declaiming iambic pentameter for all they were worth.
Sad. They didn’t leave much of a tip for the waitress, either.
And yet, in spite of all this, the show that the cast of the Tulsa Shakespeare Festival put on worked much better than one might have expected.
McKean’s vision of “Romeo and Juliet” is a bit unconventional. The pall of impending tragedy that usually suffuses this story has been cast aside. The first act is played almost as a comedy, from the first confrontation between loyalists to the warring families of Montague and Capulet (that whole “I bite my thumb at you” bit has always carried an odd note of comedy).
Even the romance between the title characters is portrayed not as some grand, earth-shaking, life-healing passion, but as a giddy high-school crush between an over-dramatically lovelorn Romeo (Stephen Brown) and a playfully exuberant Juliet (Jenny Guy).
Take the way the well-known balcony scene is played. Guy performs Juliet’s “Wherefore art thou” speech as a bout of wishful thinking, voicing thoughts she’d never thought she would utter, so that when Romeo makes himself known, she’s completely startled. And she reacts the way any teen-aged girl might react – which is to decide then and there that this romance is fated to be.
So the tragedy comes not because two kids in love had parents who just didn’t understand and wouldn’t let them be, but because Romeo and Juliet both acted like…well, like adolescents in the season of the rising sap. They decide they’re in love. And everything goes violently, bloodily wrong.
The first act Tuesday night was a little rough – the cast was having to work hard to be heard, and the verbal and physical comedy fell flat. But as the evening progressed, the pace accelerated and the show tightened considerably.
The actors spoke in their natural voices – no fake English accents – which was in keeping with the overall earthy tone of the piece.
And there were some excellent performances. Guy is superb as Juliet, swirling through just about every conceivable emotion in the course of the show’s two hours, and making them all absolutely convincing. Brown seemed to take a while to grow comfortable in the role of Romeo, but by the end of the first act, his performance became more confident and convincing.
McKean was also very good, as was Xavier Sagel as Benvolio, both turning Shakespeare’s poetry into forceful, musical, expressive speech. Sean Stewart’s Tybalt was a suave and implacable villain.
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