Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare Directed by Lukas Raphael

Romeo & Juliet exquisitely demonstrates the futility of partisanship, pleading for similar people to stop killing each other for reasons they no longer remember. Director Lukas Raphael will set the play in New York in the early 1990s, with the Montagues and Capulets imagined as families of a Lower East Side neighborhood. In this concept, the Capulets (Juliet’s people) are long-standing stewards of the neighborhood. Romeo’s Montagues, on the other hand, are upwardly mobile, eager to rise above it. Raphael once directed “Romeo and Juliet” in North London as a Tango musical set in Buenos Aires. This time, he sees his job as telling a fast, gritty story clearly and succinctly, stressing its language and incorporating sounds of the street and city to provide the backdrop. Instead of duels with swords, he will have knife fights choreographed by Frank Alfano, who staged the fights in an Off-Broadway adaptation of “A Clockwork Orange” in 2015.

photo by Jonathan Slaff