Rebels Without a Cause

At a performance of Romeo and Juliet in Boston in the 1850s starring Charlotte Cushman, the most celebrated Romeo of the day, a spectator fake sneezed loudly and derisively during an intimate scene between the cross-dressed Cushman and her Juliet, Sarah Anderton. Cushman halted the show and gallantly led Anderton offstage, as her early biographer Clara Erskine Clement put it, the way “a cavalier might lead a lady from the place where an insult had been offered her.” Cushman then returned to the footlights and confronted the offender, saying that if some man didn’t throw him out, she would do so herself. As “the fellow was taken away,” the “audience rose en masse and gave three cheers for Miss Cushman, who recalled her companion and proceeded with the play as if nothing had happened.”

Women began playing Romeo in the nineteenth century, when one leading man after another failed miserably in a role that calls for both furious sword fighting and acting unmanned. Shakespeare has Romeo kill first Tybalt, then Paris, but also has him tell Juliet, “Thy beauty hath made me effeminate,” and has him collapse, weeping, as the Friar chastises him: “Art thou a man?… Thy tears are womanish…. Unseemly woman in a seeming man.” It apparently took a gay actor like Cushman (though she never came out publicly) to render these extremes convincingly in an age of Manifest Destiny, when America experienced a crisis of manhood, as a masculinity that embraced moderation, virtue, and domesticity was elbowed out by a more aggressive one characterized by physicality and domination.

Between the 1820s and the Civil War more than a dozen women played Romeo on stages in New York City alone; The New York Times declared that “there is in the delicacy and gentleness of Romeo’s character something which requires a woman to represent it” and that the character’s “luscious language…seems strange on the lips of a man.” Fifteen years after that Boston performance the fires that had fueled Manifest Destiny were largely extinguished, having consumed the lives of some 700,000 young men who fought for the Union and the Confederacy. Female Romeos soon vanished from the stage, and this episode in theater history was all but forgotten, along with what it revealed about ultimately tragic fissures within the culture.

Romeo and Juliet is a play with an uncanny capacity to show, as Hamlet put it, “the very age and body of the time his form and pressure,” and versions of it, on film and onstage, continue to tell us what we desire, and expect, when boy meets girl. In his 1968 film Franco Zeffirelli cast Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting as the young lovers; she was only fifteen and he sixteen when cast. They embodied the free-love Sixties, at what, for these teenagers, proved to be a steep price: decades later they sued Paramount Pictures, alleging that Zeffirelli had coerced them to act in the nude as minors and then, without their knowledge, filmed them. In 1996 Baz Luhrmann first cast the fourteen-year-old Natalie Portman as Juliet opposite the twenty-one-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio, then ditched her in favor of the seventeen-year-old Claire Danes. (A disappointed Portman told The New York Times that the executives at 20th Century Fox “said it looked like Leonardo DiCaprio was molesting me when we kissed.”)

I went to see Sam Gold’s Romeo + Juliet on the same day that I voted early in a presidential election featuring a candidate who modeled to disaffected young men a crude version of masculinity. I was eager to learn what the production might say about our fraught cultural moment and its own crisis of manhood. The election was very much on the minds of those behind the show—Gold said he “was seeing November 5th coming” when he undertook to direct it. A table was set up in the theater lobby with a banner over it reading, “The youth are voting/Voters of Tomorrow/Romeo + Juliet.” An energized youth vote could swing the election. We were not going back.

Since 2015 Gold has been the only director to stage Shakespeare on Broadway. This was his third Shakespeare tragedy there in the past five years; he previously directed King Lear (2019) and Macbeth (2022), after the success of his Hamlet at the Public Theater (2017) and before that Othello at New York Theatre Workshop (2016). The venue for Romeo + Juliet, Circle in the Square, is a challenging space, but Gold, who recently directed a well-received An Enemy of the People there, had mastered it, making full and often ingenious use of the theater in the round, including having Juliet’s bed, which doubles as a balcony, descend from the rafters.^*

Gold cast as Romeo a buff twenty-year-old British heartthrob, Kit Connor, who rose to fame in Netflix’s gay-themed coming-of-age series Heartstopper. Connor’s hours in the gym paid off handsomely when he did a pull-up to reach and kiss Juliet in that bed, at which the audience cheered with delight. Juliet was played by the twenty-three-year-old Rachel Zegler, whose slight build made her look younger than her years. Zegler starred as Maria in Steven Spielberg’s 2021 production of the Romeo and Juliet musical adaptation West Side Story; in a clever twist, she now plays the character Maria was based on. The two actors were well matched and looked great together, their falling in love was convincingly and touchingly portrayed, and many of those in a house packed with Gen Z-ers and millennials crowded the roped-off stage door after the show in pursuit of an Instagram moment with the young celebrities.

I wasn’t among them, and was not of the demographic that the show’s promoters hoped to attract. When at his party Juliet’s father drank from a plastic container filled with a gallon of cherry-colored liquid, the Gen Z-ers in the house knew that this was a BORG—short for “blackout rage gallon”—a party accessory filled with vodka, powdered drink mix, and electrolytes, whereas my first thought had been to wonder why Capulet was lugging around what many in my generation would have identified as a colonoscopy prep. It was amazing, and gratifying, to see a Broadway house filled with playgoers in their twenties, drawn by the young stars, by illegally filmed snippets they had viewed on TikTok, and by the music of Jack Antonoff (responsible, among other things, for cowriting and coproducing many of Taylor Swift’s hits). Credit also goes to dots’s scene design, Enver Chakartash’s costuming, and Sonya Tayeh’s choreography for bringing this youthful world to life. We are given a rich sense of what connected these young people, though unfortunately never what they chafed against or wanted to change.

The production began wordlessly. As playgoers began to take their seats, a dozen young actors climbed onstage in ones and twos, hanging out for the next fifteen minutes or so in a gender-fluid world of blaring club music, dancing, vaping, wrestling and embracing, playing with teddy bears piled high on a trolley, and lolling about on inflated furniture. The unspoken premise, Zegler helpfully explained to an interviewer, was that this was “a group of 20-something-year-olds” who “broke into Circle in the Square on Broadway and have to get something out, to get something off their chests.” The young today have a lot to be angry about; their lives have been upended by the pandemic, a gig economy offers them dim prospects, and the state wants to control their bodies. But what exactly were these young people trying to express by reenacting the story of Romeo and Juliet?

The early display of gender fluidity was reinforced by the doubling of Tommy Dorfman, a trans woman, as the maternal Nurse (wearing a bustier) and the hotheaded Tybalt (in a black leather jacket). Romeo and Juliet, however, are conventionally heterosexual, carefully walled off from any same-sex desire (unlike other recent productions that lean into the attraction between Romeo and Benvolio or Mercutio). That conventionality is most pronounced when Juliet sings an original song, written for the production, that begins, “How sweet/You’re the man of the house to me.” Zegler has a beautiful voice, but I cringed as I heard her wonder, “How does it feel to be God?/I’m in the palm of your hand,” describe herself as a stay-at-home type (“I watch you/From the window”), and imagine telling her beloved that she will “take your name”—sentiments that would warm the hearts of those yearning for the good old days when subservient women worshiped their men. Romeo was still humming that catchy tune, “Man of the House,” now available as a single, when lying on his bed, in exile, in Mantua.

Romeo and Juliet’s headlong rush into marriage is in tension throughout with the surprising regression to childhood that characterizes so much of the production, symbolized by the teddy bears, large and small, that litter the set and even the lobby of the theater. It brought back memories of meeting my undergraduates by Zoom during the early days of the pandemic, when they had been sent home from campus and appeared on-screen sitting in childhood bedrooms, filled, surprisingly often, with stuffed animals.

Our culture’s obsession with young love, exemplified by Romeo and Juliet and nurtured by Hollywood, might well have struck Shakespeare’s contemporaries as strange. When I ask my undergraduates at what age Elizabethans married, they invariably guess thirteen or fourteen, sometimes younger than that. They are always surprised when I tell them the average age of marriage in England at that time was twenty-five or so, for both men and women, inviting speculation about what Shakespeare’s contemporaries were up to in the decade between the time they reached sexual maturity and the time they married. (And given how low illegitimacy rates were, social historians rule out procreative sex before marriage.)

The long wait was a tradeoff, a bit of social engineering: it produced economic stability, as young people finished service or apprenticeships before marrying, and there was a decent chance their parents would die around that time, which meant inheriting some money and perhaps a place to live. The price paid was the suppression of desire. Work, prayer, and nonprocreative sexual activity were undoubtedly outlets. But some of that pent-up energy inevitably spilled over into violence, something that saturates Romeo and Juliet from beginning to end.

Gold seems uncomfortable with the play’s raw, explosive, and almost casual violence, which is stylized here rather than realistic. He also downplays Romeo’s aggressive masculinity as well as his more effeminate moments. Connor’s Romeo doesn’t blame Juliet for having made him soft, nor does the Friar liken him to a woman. Rather than stab Tybalt to death, he punches and then strangles him (though Tybalt had just used a knife to kill Mercutio). He seems genuinely shocked by what he has done, making it feel closer to manslaughter than murder. Most notably, Romeo’s violent dispatching of Paris in the final scene is cut. (That must have been a late decision; friends who saw Gold’s production in early previews witnessed the stabbing. Apparently apparently Romeo used the crowbar with which he pries open Juliet’s tomb as his murder weapon.) The cumulative effect of these choices was to turn Shakespeare’s often brutal tragedy into something more romantically appealing.

In minimizing how violently Romeo acts, Gold follows the films of Zeffirelli and Luhrmann, both of which cut Romeo’s killing of Paris. With few exceptions, movie adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, even those that are critically acclaimed, have struggled to earn back what they cost to make. Not Romeo and Juliet. Zeffirelli’s earned close to $40 million domestically, Luhrmann’s $46 million. And Shakespeare in Love (1998), which cannily incorporated the romantic plot of Romeo and Juliet, grossed more than twice that in the United States. I can’t think of another Shakespeare play whose staging today is so powerfully shaped by Hollywood values, which have celebrated and idealized young love to the exclusion of so much else in a tragedy of a society rife with tension.

In Gold’s production, this has meant jettisoning a great deal, beginning with Verona’s rigid social hierarchies. When one servant tells another (in an exchange Gold cuts) that “the quarrel is between our masters and us their men,” it’s hard to tell whether he is talking about interclass strife or the rivalry between Capulet and Montague. You wouldn’t know it from watching this production but the Prince, Mercutio, and County Paris are noblemen, the Capulets and Montagues, though wealthy merchants, only middling class, and their servants far below them. Modern editions of the play call Juliet’s mother “Lady Capulet,” but she’s no lady (Shakespeare’s speech headings read “Capulet’s Wife”). When Gold explains in a New Yorker Radio Hour interview that the play’s opening line—“Two households, both alike in dignity”—suggests that “we are more the same than we are different,” he misunderstands the line and its implications for the story that follows. By “alike in dignity” Shakespeare meant not “equally worthy or dignified” in a moral sense but rather “of the identical rank or social station.” Capulet hates being on the same level as his enemy, and the plot turns on his plans to marry his daughter Juliet to the noble Paris, whereby he will secure for his heirs a higher social standing.

There is a cost to downplaying the social divisions on which the tragedy rests. As the child of a rich merchant, Romeo has inevitably absorbed some of his family’s values. How could he not? It comes out in his language early on. When he first sees Juliet he says (in words cut from this production, perhaps because they now sound both crassly commercial as well as racist) that “she hangs upon the cheek of night/As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear,” and not long after, in lines that Gold retains, he tells Juliet, “I am no pilot, yet wert thou as far/As that vast shore washed with the farthest sea,/I should adventure for such merchandise.” Juliet as merchandise? The irony that the theater lobby had a merch stand—spectators sitting around me had spent plenty there on posters and teddy bears—seems lost on this production.

By the time he turned to Romeo and Juliet around 1595, Shakespeare had already written a string of successful histories as well as several comedies. But this was only his second tragedy (after Titus Andronicus), and he found his way to it through comedy. For its first two acts, Romeo and Juliet is a perfect New Comedy, that familiar genre in which a young heterosexual couple fall in love, overcome a rival as well as the will of a blocking figure (here, a father), and marry. This was by far the stronger half of the production, and Gold was gifted at mining its seams of humor.

But three acts remain, in which comedy turns into tragedy, inviting the question of who or what was responsible for this turn in the play. In the twentieth century scholars quarreled over whether this was a tragedy of fate in which the unlucky lovers are “star-crossed,” or alternatively a tragedy of character (an immature Romeo was to blame, or an impetuous Juliet, a meddling Friar, a feckless Nurse, or the self-interested parents). More recent critics in search of the root causes of the tragedy have focused on the social tensions of this patriarchal, plague-ridden, competitive, and violent world.

In gesturing at why those young people who broke into the theater need to get something off their chests, the official website for Gold’s production declares: “THE YOUTH ARE F**KED.” They undoubtedly are, though in this production we never learn by whom or what. Montague and his wife don’t appear, and Juliet’s mother and father are doubled by one actor, Sola Fadiran, so it’s hard to pin the tragedy on the largely absent parents. Gabby Beans skillfully handles the roles of both Mercutio and Friar Lawrence, and covers speeches Shakespeare had assigned to the Chorus and the Prince as well, but that means we never actually encounter the Prince, the political figure who acknowledges his share of responsibility for a tragedy whose impact is felt by all of Verona. The doubling of young and old roles, by actors who don’t much change how they dress or speak when switching parts, makes it even harder to feel the gulf between generations. Tensions over political, religious, and parental authority go largely unexplored. The most fearsome authority figures here are the ushers, who glared sternly at playgoers who wouldn’t turn off their smartphones and threatened banishment for anyone caught filming the show.

Perhaps the closest Gold gets to addressing the source of the tragedy comes in his production’s most inspired scene. In Shakespeare’s original, on the morning that Juliet is supposed to marry Paris, her sleeping body is discovered by the Nurse and her parents, who believe that she has died and bear her to the Capulets’ tomb. At that moment a group of musicians arrive, expecting to play at her wedding. Before they are sent away, Peter, one of the Capulet servants, asks them to play a song, “Heart’s Ease,” to lessen his grief. Most directors now cut this exchange, but Gold keeps it, writing a note in the script shared with reviewers that reads: “*Substitute Heart’s ease with a contemporary pop song and allow for improvisation.” That brief note doesn’t convey the brilliance of what follows, as Peter calls instead for “We Are Young.” Released in 2011 by the band Fun (of which Antonoff was a member), the song quickly became a millennial and Gen Z anthem, celebrating the freedom and heartache those generations associated with their youth.

Merely to have Paris start singing “Tonight we are young” would have been clever enough, but Gold’s production goes further and invites the audience to join in. As hundreds of playgoers joyously began to sing the familiar lyrics, you could feel a wave of nostalgia wash over the room. But the music was suddenly and harshly cut off, and the silenced crowd got the message: youth and its dreams die; all that remains is adulthood in a dull and unrewarding world. Romeo and Juliet, who don’t live long enough to suffer this fate, may be the lucky ones. There isn’t much agency for anyone else, or much hope that an older generation is going to fix things, or even acknowledge that they are broken, which may explain the impulse to regress and hug those teddy bears, or playact.

The relentless unfolding of the plot, which takes place over just five days, never allows much time for Romeo or Juliet to arrive at the sort of hard-earned self-knowledge that Hamlet or Lear attains. What Romeo manages to learn is compressed into his encounter with the Apothecary. Exchanging money for poison, he says, “There is thy gold, worse poison to men’s souls,/Doing more murder in this loathsome world/Than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell.”

While the merchant’s son may belatedly recognize the corrosiveness of money, the merchant himself, as well as Juliet’s father, fails to. On seeing the dead bodies of their children—in an exchange Gold cuts entirely—Capulet extends his hand to his rival, saying, “This is my daughter’s jointure, for no more/Can I demand.” Even now he can’t quite rid himself of the idea that his child’s marriage is a financial deal. Montague, no less clueless, responds, “But I can give thee more,/For I will raise her statue in pure gold.” Not to be outdone, Capulet replies, “As rich shall Romeo’s by his lady’s lie,/Poor sacrifices of our enmity.” Confronted by such devastating loss, their imaginations still cannot extend beyond what’s golden.

Playgoers at the Circle in the Square never hear their exchange, as the final scene of Romeo + Juliet is radically cut from 2,500 words to four hundred. The Prince is nowhere to be seen, nor are any of the adults in the play. We watch as Romeo, then Juliet, dies by suicide. But absent so much of what drove them to it, from which the young audience has been insulated, their deaths didn’t feel devastating, just inevitable.

Sam Gold has directed a Romeo and Juliet for our disengaged times. If America’s youth are fucked, they have responded with remarkable passivity to that fate: the number of Gen Z voters in the presidential election fell significantly from four years ago, dropping well below 50 percent, and the majority of young men aged eighteen to twenty-nine cast their votes for Donald Trump. If Americans are more the same than different, it is in our embrace of celebrity and consumerism, and in our reluctance to look too deeply into what is wrong with our society. I am not sure what young playgoers unfamiliar with Romeo and Juliet thought Shakespeare was trying to say, or what Gold wanted them to take away from the experience of seeing his entertaining version of it, beyond a fun evening on Broadway. They deserved better. So did Shakespeare. When I returned to see the production again a week after the election, the banner promoting voting had been taken down, though the teddy bears were still there, and the merch counter was doing a brisk business.