Romeo and Juliet,
On Motifs of Shakespeare,
choreographed by Mark Morris to
music by Sergei Prokofiev.
Avid dance-goers, and even avid fans of Mark Morris’s choreography, will be strongly divided over his Romeo and Juliet. In fact, the more you know about story ballets and the more familiar you are with other danced versions of Shakespeare’s early tragedy, the more likely you are to scratch your head on first viewing Morris’s distinctly unballetic production. The realization that this is actually one of his narrative masterpieces— comparable in some respects to Dido and Aeneas or The Hard Nut, though finally unlike anything he’s done before—is not something that came to me before the second or even third time I saw it, and one cannot necessarily demand such assiduous attendance, even from the devoted. But for those with the eyes to see clearly, including young people new to dance, bookish types, adventurous music fans, curious theater patrons, Russian history experts, amateur and professional scholars of Shakespeare, and others who are not blinded by expectations, Morris’s Romeo and Juliet can have an instantaneous and profound appeal.
At first I myself was of two minds. There were things I liked tremendously right away: Amber Darragh’s Mercutio, for one; the intensely moving funeral of Mercutio and Tybalt, where dance and plot, symmetry and sense, utterly reinforce each other; the role of Friar Laurence, as portrayed by John Heginbotham within Allen Moyer’s brilliantly conceived monk’s cell; the unexpectedly youthful and sexy Nurse, danced by Lauren Grant; Joe Bowie’s noble Prince of Verona; the distinct class difference between the Capulet parents and the Montague pair, as performed by four of Mark Morris’s most engaging retired dancers, Shawn Gannon, Megan Williams, Guillermo Resto, and Teri Weksler…but the list of good things is long, and has been so augmented by later viewings that I can no longer swear which ones were there to begin with. What I do remember is that I left the first performance thinking: It’s great theater—but is it great dance?
Part of what made me feel this way is the fact that Morris intentionally throws away some of the score’s biggest dance numbers. Where other (mainly ballet) choreographers have used the swelling music to give the lovers yet another duet, or Juliet a fancy solo, or somebody else a showcase leap or two, Morris will occasionally use such moments for a scene change, or perhaps for a quiet, thoughtful moment of non-dance. At times this almost seems perverse, as if he were willfully thwarting our expectations. Well, guess what? He is.
This becomes clearest during an odd passage that occurs relatively late in the performance, when Juliet has just taken the death-imitating drug and sits slumped on her upstage bed. Her mother and her nurse perch themselves at the foot of the bed to watch the dance extravaganza organized by Paris, the successful suitor, as part of his gift-giving display. Each of these three dance numbers is more repellent than the last—one features violent hip-swaying and eyelash-batting by patently lascivious women, another displays mindless men in full drink-swilling, elbow-nudging mode—and behind them we get smug Paris himself, ridiculously strumming a banjo as he smirks beneath his sparkly pillbox hat. Mean-while, as our eyes and ears are dominated by this tripe, Juliet, unnoticed, sinks into a coma. It’s as if Morris is saying to us: Dance is the artificial thing that happens in the foreground when real life, the stuff that matters, is going on behind. If this is a strange thing to hear from a choreographer, it is not inconsistent with the mixed, ironic attitude he has shown toward dance in the past. In a televised interview about his masterful L’Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato, for instance, he once said, “I’m of two minds, at least, about the dancing thing, you know. One is that it’s just a dance, it’ll be over pretty soon, don’t lose your shirt: if you don’t like it, you could always, like, just go home, or just stick it out, ’cause it will be over pretty soon.”
Morris’s most important collaboration is always with the music, and in that weird bedroom scene he had Prokofiev’s firm support: it was the composer, after all, who inserted those bizarre dances into the action at that point, just after Juliet swallowed the drug. But Morris, in this case, is serving two masters, Prokofiev and Shakespeare, and there are times when their viewpoints diverge. In the version of the score that Morris uses for his production—Prokofiev’s original Romeo and Juliet, which was written in 1935, squelched by Stalin, and only recently rediscovered by Simon Morrison—Prokofiev departed rather extremely from the text, creating an ambiguous (I wouldn’t go so far as to say “happy”) ending that has the lovers escaping Verona and fleeing off to some fantastical Elsewhere. But if this violates Shakespeare’s explicit plan, it does so in a way that solves many of the problems I have always had with the play; and part of Morris’s genius has been to use the various eccentricities—his own, Prokofiev’s, even the text’s—to render up the most persuasively theatrical Romeo and Juliet I’ve ever seen.
Just think about it for a minute. Once you dispose of the need for that O. Henryishly overplotted, precisely mistimed double-death scene, you can get rid of all the ludicrously complicated stage business that leads up to it —the second friar who is charged with conveying the crucial message, the unfortunate confinement in the plague house, the clownish apothecary Romeo has to dig up in Mantua—not to mention our suspicions about Friar Laurence’s role in the whole thing. (Why didn’t he attend to the message himself? Might it be that, out of some kind of misguided religious scruple, he preferred a dead Juliet to a bigamously wed one?) All this is gone in a trice. In its place we have a much-softened Friar Laurence, a slow-moving, thoughtful, unworldly fellow who paces about town picking up herbs for his private study—someone who loves Juliet, and especially Romeo, with a paternal feeling of affection, and who joyfully rings a clanging bell (Morris takes the bell out of the pit, where Prokofiev had it, and puts it right onstage) to announce that the two lovers have escaped alive. We also get out of that whole worship-of-the-dying-girl routine that, for me, spoils not only Juliet’s deathbed speech but also all the dance versions—except, notably, West Side Story—that preceded Morris’s. (Kenneth Macmillan’s ballet was particularly annoying in this regard, though it was partially saved from its own inherent distastefulness by the transcendent grace of Alessandra Ferri.)
And the wish that is fulfilled by having Romeo and Juliet escape from their parents’ blood-strewn history is not a cheap, sentimental one, for it contains within itself the acknowledgment of the opposing truth: the awareness, that is, that no love like this could ever survive in that violent, barbaric world. The realm Romeo and Juliet flee to in the Morris version is a star-studded blue heaven that resembles nothing we have seen onstage before, where they will apparently “live in love forever.” In other words, this final place of refuge is no more tangible than a death-dealt afterlife would have been, and carries no false assurances about the practical possibilities for young love’s survival in the universe as we know it.
This particular Verona is barbaric in a very special way, for it combines medieval Italy—inflected, perhaps, with just a touch of Mafioso ferociousness—and Stalinized Russia. The combination is evident in everything from the folk-style hand gestures (signaling a range of traditional insults: “Fuck you,” “Up yours,” “I will bite my thumb at them,” and the like) to the costumes (long, richly patterned skirts for the women, bulky upper-body padding for the men); in each case the quality, the feeling, is simultaneously Russian and Italian. And nowhere is this merging of ethnic traditions more apparent than in the actual dances. Time and again, Morris draws on the common elements of, say, Cossack and Neapolitan dance styles—the knee-and-hip swivels, the rhythmic hand claps, the men’s squats and leaps, the women’s drooped heads and shielding arms, the diagonal movements of dancers across the floor—to stress the extent to which we are embedded in two scary cultures at once. I have never seen a more socially astute nor more frightening version of Shakespeare’s Verona; the only thing that comes close to it is the Denmark conveyed in Kozintsev’s great Russian film version of Hamlet, and there too we clearly have Stalin to thank for the inspiration.
Morris’s awareness of the surrounding social world is clearly allied with his musical sensitivities. He responds not only to Prokofiev’s evident Russianness, but also to the fact that the composer himself was ultimately a victim of the terrifyingly oppressive forces he portrayed in his music. With his work banned under the Zhdanov Decree of 1948, Prokofiev was forced to apologize publicly for the “formalism” and “atonalism” of works like Romeo and Juliet. This nightmarish situation, which imposed silence on many of Russia’s greatest mid-century composers, persisted for over five years: it did not end until Stalin’s death, on March 5, 1953. But that was too late for Prokofiev, who died the same day as Stalin and thus never knew the nightmare had ended.
Among the things Morris has done, in his recent gift to Prokofiev, is to show how effectively those formal and atonal musical elements can be used to create an emotion-laden drama. The obvious irony is that this is the exact purpose toward which the tin-eared Soviet watchdogs were officially pushing their allegedly recalcitrant composers. And yet the authorities would have been horrified at these results. For to convey Shakespeare with all his powers unleashed is to question any form of governmental power that has ever been invented. Directors like Kozintsev and composers like Prokofiev understood this quite well, of course, which is why they were drawn to Shakespeare in the first place. And in Morris’s version of Romeo and Juliet, this questioning is taken even further. It is not just the adult world powers-that-be and the nefarious government-by-the-sword that are being exposed in this production; it is also the whole set of conventions guiding the behavior of men toward women.
The character who most clearly embodies this aim of Morris’s (which is also, quite demonstrably, an aim of Shakespeare’s) is Paris, the well-born friend of the Capulets who aspires to Juliet’s hand. In the play, he is a largely unobjectionable blank for the first half of the action, and he only starts to throw his weight around in an unpleasant way when Juliet shows signs of resisting him. Morris makes him an arrogant jerk from his first appearance. Glued to that silly pillbox hat (he is the only man at the Capulet ball, or indeed in most of the other scenes, who is wearing a hat at all) and strutting around as if he owned the place, Paris is obliviously brutal. When he grabs his dance partner by the wrist, or leans threateningly over her, he does it with a sense of entitlement, as if that’s how the dance is supposed to go. Yet we only have to compare Paris and Juliet’s performance of a couple dance with Lord and Lady Capulet’s rendition of the exact same steps to see what a difference character makes. When Lady Capulet is lifted across Lord Capulet’s body, or when she raises her hand over her head as they circle around each other, the gestures signify partnership and collaboration; but when Paris forcibly jerks Juliet from one side to the other, and when she cowers beneath her own arm, what we see instead is threat and fear.
To play the villainous Paris, Mark Morris has chosen one of his most seductive and appealing dancers, Bradon Macdonald, who has been persuaded to use all his usual virtues against himself. Macdonald’s strength and precision are here converted into a kind of prissy, barely withheld violence; his charm and ease are translated into a bad case of narcissistic vanity. For audience members who have treasured Macdonald’s performances in the past, it is almost painful to watch this, and I think it is no coincidence that Paris is also the presenter—the choreographer, as it were—of the most irritating dance sequence in the show, those three ugly dances that take place while Juliet is fading. If maleness is being mocked in him, then so is the standard-male-choreographer idea of dance, as something that is all artificial display and fake sexuality. Macdonald undertakes this thankless role wholeheartedly and—I would have said “manfully,” if his own calculatedly effective performance hadn’t reduced that word of praise to such a sorry label.
Romeo and Juliet‘s other villain, just as in the play, is Juliet’s cousin Tybalt, who is such a hothead that he can never let the family feud with the Montagues rest for even a minute. Morris’s Tybalt is exactly like Shakespeare’s: a “Prince of Cats” with a feline nastiness—a tendency to hiss or claw at the slightest provocation—and absolutely no sense of humor. The only difference is that Morris’s Tybalt is played by a woman, Julie Worden, a beautiful dancer who, like Macdonald, has been asked to twist and distort her own innate expressiveness. Her icy beauty is here reduced to unsmiling hauteur, and her eloquently pointed chin, constantly uplifted in aggressive disdain, seems sharp enough to slice an opponent from gullet to gizzard. In her portrayal of Tybalt, Worden perfectly embodies three of the major defects—snobbery, self-righteousness, and unbridled anger—that make Shakespeare’s Verona such a difficult place to inhabit. And part of the tautness of her performance, part of its sense of rage and restriction, comes from the fact that the dancer is having to violate her own nature.
The opposite happens in the other case of cross-gender casting, which is the assignment—though that is too faint a word for this glorious merging of character and person—of Mercutio’s role to Amber Darragh. Mercutio has always been my favorite figure in the play (I tend to pretty much lose interest after he dies), but I have never seen a Mercutio to rival Darragh’s. Neither her relative tallness nor her strong, handsome features nor even her witty, enchanting smile can fully account for her success in this role. Her shape-shifting is beyond belief: she becomes Mercutio, and in her rendering of the delightful, antic solo Morris has made for her, she gives us the closest thing to the “Queen Mab” speech that dance has ever produced. She is unquestionably, persuasively male (a woman I sat next to at one performance gave me a drop-jawed look of surprise when I referred to Mercutio as “she”), and yet something about the fact that she is actually female comes through, softening the usual harsh bawdiness of Mercutio’s character and making it seem more playful, less determined. Having a woman in this part also lends a strong, new undertone to the passion—friendly, joking, but also romantic and sexy—that Romeo and Mercutio clearly feel for each other. Morris is not making this up. It is fully there in the play, and on a psychological level it accounts for why Romeo and Juliet can’t consummate their love until after Mercutio dies. But that intensity between the two men has rarely worked in either the danced or the theatrical versions I’ve seen before, where it has generally been ignored entirely or else made exaggeratedly homoerotic. Here, perhaps because one of the men is really a woman, it comes through simply and easily. To those who scurrilously charge Mark Morris with an inability to portray male-female love, I say: Look at his Romeo and Mercutio.
Or, for that matter, his Romeo and Juliet. Two separate pairs of lovers have been cast in this production, so depending on which performance you see, you might catch David Leventhal and Rita Donahue or Noah Vinson and Maile Okamura in the title roles. Each couple lends something different to the parts. The Vinson/Okamura duo are a bit like innocent children preyed on by a frightening world of adults: they are thinner, more delicate, more fragile than the other pair, and their duets are somewhat more ethereal. When Paris yanks this Juliet around by her waist, it almost seems as if she will break in half. But Leventhal and Donahue are, I think, the better actors, so their performance is persuasive in a different way: Donahue’s Juliet won’t break, but we sense her fear of Paris in the precise way she flinches under his glance, just as we sense her instantaneous love of Romeo in the way her face lights up in response to his.
Morris has created, in his Juliet, a perfect dance equivalent to Shakespeare’s courageous, independent-minded, passionate heroine. This Juliet not only proposes first, just as she does in the play; she is also the first to lift Romeo off the ground, and though he subsequently lifts her many times over, we never forget that it was her strength, her passion, which unashamedly emerged first. To say that theirs is an egalitarian relationship sounds foolishly “correct,” but there is a true balance between the members of the Mark Morris couple that is both charming and faithful to the play—perhaps even more faithful than the composer’s version was. In the widening circle that Romeo and Juliet make as they dance their final dance in the Elsewhere that is Nowhere (an exact reversal of the circling inward that characterized their first duet together), we may be able to see a reference to the version of the play that is not here, an implied allegiance to that original plot in which the two lovers were separated by death and joined forever in memory. This abiding loyalty, to Shakespeare as well as Prokofiev, has served Mark Morris well. For it turns out that in making good theater, he has also made good dance, unforgettable dance. They are not, in the end, so very different after all.
Wendy Lesser, founding editor of The Threepenny Review, has published eight books, including Room for Doubt, Pictures at an Execution, and Nothing Remains the Same. Her next book will be about Shostakovich and his fifteen string quartets.
