Director's Note
Ask anyone which of Shakespeare’s plays they studied in high school and Romeo and Juliet will be one of the titles listed. Romeo and Juliet is perhaps Shakespeare’s most well known play having been adapted into opera, ballet, a Broadway musical, movies and an animated film. As a high school theatre director I have never had the desire to direct Romeo and Juliet, until this past spring when I saw the Stratford Festival production. I had always considered Romeo and Juliet to be a play about the impetuousness of youth and calamity of timing, but as I watched this production I discovered a connection to the events happening in our country and in fair Verona. Like the world of the play, America is engulfed in a war of opposing “households”: Republicans and Democrats. But instead of rapiers, social media is the weapon and the cafeteria is our town square. Within the classroom, conversations ensue in which student is pitted against student merely on the basis of whose parent voted for whom. We are Verona, where two households hold an ancient grudge and our students, the star-crossed lovers, are left to navigate this civil strife. So the big question for me is, how do we help our students navigate this morass of media hate and judgment? Shakespeare may not have had the answer, but he certainly provided a vehicle in the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet to help teach. We should take his words to heart.
See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.
And I for winking at your discords too
Have lost a brace of kinsmen: all are punish'd.