ROMEO AND JULIET

by William Shakespeare, translated by Søren Olsen, edited by Emma Murray

Director, Composer, Translator

BLURB

From its chaotic, unorthodox opening brawl, Søren Olsen’s Romeo and Juliet delivers a bold, unapologetic reimagining that challenges the legacy of Shakespeare’s classic romance. Hot-mess celebrity parties, perilous make-outs, and passion-fueled duels collide in this director-designer’s vision of theatrical candy. Barreling forward at breakneck speed and interlaced with the iconic text, this highly physical production offers its own tragic answer to the question: Why do we keep letting love die?

DIRECTOR’s NOTE (REINTERPRETATION)

I began reinterpreting Romeo and Juliet through the lens of the end memorials. I had been seeing memorials everywhere: names in hashtags, murals painted on walls, extravagant statues in public squares. I read the final moments of the play and had an eerie insight: the dead are often mourned with monuments, but hardly ever with quick transformation. I’ve seen real human tragedy rapidly turned into t-shirts, tote bags, and branded merchandise, a tokenized marketed grief with no policy shift, no structural reckoning. The play haunted me with its clarity: two young people try to love across a divide, and their deaths are quickly folded into a performance of unity that ultimately is absorbed by those in power and repackaged for personal gain. In a world governed by material and image, their love is real, and it gets them killed.

What struck me most is how the play uses love not just as romance, but as resistance. I saw the Capulets and Montagues everywhere: in Republicans vs. Liberals, in “woke” vs. “traditional,” in the endless binary debates that keep us people angry. I saw the useless Prince in the hollow authority of World Leaders, who, like Escalus, speaks of order but positions the people against one another. Romeo and Juliet felt less like a historical artifact and more like a mirror. I am living in a world that lets love die, not because it isn’t strong, but because we’ve allowed power (politics, economics, media, and faith) to define the boundaries of personhood, identity, and connection. This reinterpretation is my way of asking: What might it take for love to survive that? And what would we have to let go of collectively to make this four hundred year old play feel irrelevant?

NOTE ON TRANSLATION:

The process of translation was a teeter totter between relevancy and archive. With every choice while editing the text I was attempting to add more weight to the side of relevancy, and honoring the parts of the archaic that I playfully wanted to stay connected with. I gave myself permission to play with tradition, sometimes preserving and sometime inventing, while imagining stage images as a modern theatre maker surrounded by technology. Choices were designed to increase accessibility, shorten considerably, heighten dramatic action, and saturate the original story with as much gooey romance and violence I believed it originally possessed.

Creative Team

CAST

CREW