Playwright: Joe Calarco. At: The Journeymen at the Berger Park Cultural Center, 6205 W. Granville. Phone: 773-761-3294; $15. Runs through: Aug. 21
Back before laptops and Facebook, boarding-school life—particularly in a cloistered religiously affiliated institution—could be an experience as oppressive as a prison sentence. Small wonder that four young students should seek escape from its doctrinaire curriculum through midnight readings of classical literature proscribed by their straitlaced guardians. Tonight’s foray into the forbidden is the romantic manifesto, Shakespeare’s Romeo And Juliet, a tale of love refusing to bow under the yoke of authority. As they re-enact the story, however, the words uttered by those impersonating the smitten lovers begin to resonate in unforeseen ways.
The mistake most often made in productions of Joe Calarco’s play is to hurry the creative spectacle by having the boys take too readily to the homosexual undercurrents inherent in unigender casting of heterosexual roles. But Journeymen director Frank Pullen is smarter than that, and has instructed his actors to begin by swaggering with adolescent irreverence, mocking the elderly characters with cartoonish voices. This allows the dynamic between the Romeo and Juliet impersonators—and the unease it engenders in their chums—to flower gradually, with the pivotal moment occurring in the wedding scene: at first the friar and nurse surrogates oppose the performance of the ceremony, but when the nuptial couple proceeds to swear their allegiance by reciting Shakespeare’s “Summer’s Day” sonnet, one of the naysayers relents, arguing the fourth comrade with the “Marriage Of True Minds” sonnet.
This heightened attention to subtext does not mandate that the staging take a back seat to a literary conceit in lesser hands bordering on preciosity. While the interior of the beachfront coach house behind the Berger Park mansion exhibits considerable evidence of rehabbing since its inauguration as a theater space in 2008, the intimate dimensions and cinderblock walls prohibit sophisticated technical effects. But the quartet of talented and disciplined artists, all barely older than their personae, conjure complexity and emotional investment to be found in far more extravagantly equipped ventures, armed with only their text, a trunk, a black-curtain shell, and a length of fabric transformed, at various points, into stately robes, tousled bedcovers, swords, poison vials and visual representations of the interpersonal tensions (an abstraction—trust me—easily accessible, despite its description). By the time our Romeo entreats his peers, in the words of a Midsummer Night’s Dream, not to abandon him, we are as joyful as he is to see enduring friendship triumph over hostile prejudice.