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Romeo and Juliet
The core couple in Djukic’s rendition of Shakespeare’s impetuous doomed lovers would make the whole endeavor worthwhile no matter what went on around them. When Wedoff and Holzfeind share the stage, they give off the sense that they too have lost track of the world outside of themselves. In the opening scenes, Holzfeind’s introspective Romeo mopes over unrequited puppy love, while Wedoff’s indistinctive parent-pleaser Juliet seems content to sleepwalk through her days.
As soon as they spot each other, however, fresh passion is awakened within them. In the exquisite intimacy of their scenes together and the anguish they display when kept apart, the two actors exude a simultaneous confusion and elation; this Juliet and her Romeo may not fully understand the rush they induce in one another, but they’d gladly die before giving it up.
What goes on around them, it turns out, is pretty solid and fairly straightforward. Staged on Martin Andrew’s skeletal semicircle of platforms and scaffolding, with Keith Parham’s stark lights setting the mood, Djukic’s R & J is neither period nor revisionist, not too stuffy and not too contemporary (with the possible exception of Peter DeFaria’s oddly tough-guy Friar Laurence).
The director’s only grand flourish caps off his simple, sound staging: a simple lack of sound. The denouement in the Capulet tomb is wordless and compressed. Though it seems like heresy, it succeeds; watching the needless, heedless deaths play out in quicksilver silence is a rash and sudden lightning bolt to the gut.
