Sunday Special: Romi/EO and Juliet portrays modern take on Shakespeare

Submitted by Lexi Schmitz

Arimeta Diop, Online Editor
March 8, 2015

The stage is set with young girls playing hopscotch and jumping rope. One of them is clearly an outsider among the others.When this outcast is rejected by her playmates she turns to her parents who also turn their backs on her. She then finds a new family in the Montagues, a new home in a city called Verona and gives herself a new, more true, name: Romeo.

From Feb. 25-28, Minnesota State University Moorhead put on a production of Romi/EO and Juliet. The classic Shakespearean language of the tragedy was put to a modern setting, complete with iPhones and a selfie or two. While at first the juxtaposition of Shakespeare in a modern time made me nervous, the setting of this production never took away from the overall atmosphere of the play. It in fact made me appreciate the story all the more. A story which remained centered around Romeo, as portrayed by freshman Lexi Schmitz, and the love affair he has with Juliet, played by sophomore Emily Carlson. However in this staging, Romeo is transgender: a male born in a female body.

When I read Romeo and Juliet my freshman year, Romeo’s moans and whines over his broken heart and his love life were never lines that I could connect to; I never found myself feeling empathetic towards him. But now, because MSUM chose this lens of sexual identity and acceptance to portray the production, Romeo’s discontent nature and angst suddenly resonated with me. The struggle for Romeo to love and be loved was emphasized by the re-imagining of the story. This staging led me to see Romeo as a young man desperate to be accepted and loved for exactly who he was rather than a horny teen lacking a girlfriend.

The cast as a whole made me appreciate this tragedy on a grander scale. I found myself laughing at jokes I did not know were present in the first place and choking up as Romeo revealed to Juliet that he was transgender. The balcony scene revealed a deeper level of sensitivity when he unbuttoned his shirt and showed Juliet his tightly bound chest. My heart split in half when the eccentric, drug-addicted Mercutio, played by junior Elliott Heerman, was killed. The story never changed, but the manner in which the actors delivered their lines and the way each scene was choreographed made me see it as if for the first time.

A theatre production can be good even when it lacks depth. However, once directors, actors and technicians purposefully incorporate more meaning into their work and present that work to we the audience, a moment akin to magic happens. Personally, I went from knowing the story of Romeo and Juliet to actually having a connection to the material and feeling moved by the tragedy of it all.

By the end of the show I was convincing myself that Romeo and Juliet would somehow both live happily ever after. They were two people that wanted to be accepted for who they actually were and not the image they had to portray. However the deaths of these characters was inevitable and in that fact is an unwritten truth: love and acceptance are powerful needs and drives.