Let’s be honest: Most of us don’t understand every word of Shakespeare. We rely on actors as our Renaissance English translators and interpreters. Our job, in turn, is to be not expert but game: to rejoice when we understand, to be curious and keep trying when we don’t, to don our detective hats and relish the chase of meaning.
如果你是monolingual, as I am, you might find watching California Shakespeare Theater’s bilingual“Romeo y Juliet”to be not entirely different from trying to take in regular-old Billy Shakes.
Karen Zacarías’ script, whose world premiere opened Saturday, June 4, invites non-Spanish-speaking audiences to whet our powers of comprehension. As ensemble members switch back and forth between the two languages, often within a single line, the show continuously holds out the promise that if you just lean in a little further, if you just sharpen your ears, you’ll pick up clues, divine references, absorb through osmosis and infer your way to the gist.
A great big ask of some audiences, after all, can welcome others: those who have never felt Shakespeare is for them.
Still, in the show’s opening scenes, as director KJ Sanchez outlines the death-dealing feud between the Montagues and the Capulets in Alta California in 1848, the adaptation’s setting, and introduces the star-crossed love at first sight between Romeo (Sarita Ocón) and Juliet (Gianna DiGregorio Rivera), the proceedings can seem both tentative and rote. It’s as if the language-hopping is still an obstacle for the actors, as if they’re not sure how it’ll land, and they’re muffling themselves to brace for bumps.
Even here, though, Jessie Amoroso’s costume design is a show in its own right. Extremely wide-legged pants made out of serape-like material for Ocón’s Romeo perfectly express the way her character straddles masculine and feminine. For Juan Amador’s Mercutio, a leather design on a pair of chaps matches his bolero’s leather lapels (haute couture designers, take note), which is just the right splashy choice for the splashiest of characters, who’s first to inject drama into a scene and first to morph it into something else.
Then, midway through, jitters and hesitancy evaporate, and Sanchez’s choices aren’t just helpful but scorching.
When Juliet’s cousin Tybalt (Hugo Carbajal) pursues the Montagues and a besotted Romeo pleads that everyone forgo violence, you might find yourself heeding Romeo differently. That’s partly because the cry comes from a female actor this time around, and we’re accustomed to affording women moral clarity on male violence. But it’s not just any female actor — it’s Ocón, who gives her text the quietly unshakeable purity of the heaven-sent. Later, in the same fight, as her Romeo exacts vengeance upon Tybalt for killing Mercutio, it’s she who lets out a belly-ripping scream, as if she weren’t slaying but slain.
That’s what it is to be young in this hate-fueled world, Sanchez implies. If you’re not yet marked for death, that’s only because you’re marking it on someone else. Yet the horror is the same on either side.
This production’s take on Juliet is just as striking, which is all the more remarkable because Rivera came on to the project within days of opening night, filling in for Vero Maynez. Despite performing with script in hand, she shows how Juliet must grow up within a matter of days from girl still playing hide-and-seek with her nurse (Wilma Bonet) to solemn, worldly woman who’s responsible for her own decisions, who’s capable of perceiving her family’s limitations and working around them.
The older generation all remain standing in “Romeo y Juliet.” One by one, almost every youth, each hope for the future, is picked off. The old world can only get older now, nursing its hates, drowning its sorrows. Punishment is meted out, but who’s left to do penance for?
M“Romeo y Juliet”:Adapted by Karen Zacarías from William Shakespeare. Directed by KJ Sanchez. Through June 19. Two hours, 25 minutes. $30-$70. California Shakespeare Theater, 100 California Shakespeare Theater Way, Orinda. 510-548-9666.www.calshakes.org