How many ways can the most ill-fated love story unfold in a single season?
At West Village Theatre, the answer is at least two.
In the fall, The Shakespeare Company partnered with Calgary Young People’s Theatre to present a full-text Romeo and Juliet, casting young actors in the roles of young lovers. Joel David Taylor played Friar Lawrence.
Now he’s back in the same theatre space, same source material, but a different angle.
The new production, Shakespeare’s R&J, adapted by Joe Calarco, is presented by The Shakespeare Company and Sage Theatre with the support of Calgary Young People’s Theatre. The story strips the play down to four performers, students at a strict private school.
They sneak away one night, find a copy of Romeo and Juliet, and begin reading it aloud together.
“We have four actors playing all of the roles, and it’s quite different,” Taylor says. “It’s quite a cool kind of re-imagining of the piece, and so it’s been a lot of fun to work on.”
For Taylor, returning to the same Shakespeare text twice in one season has been an interesting experience.
“The more time you spend with something, the deeper and deeper you can navigate through it and explore it,” he says. “Just to look at these scenes through the lens of the other side of the argument, the other side of the conflict has been a ton of fun.”
And this version questions the tragedy of the inevitable ending.
” … you get this kind of beautiful hopefulness as they kind of carry these aspects of things they’ve learned throughout the story on and into their lives moving forward,” Taylor says.
After appearing in Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night last season, and now two versions of Romeo and Juliet this year, Taylor may be permanently orbiting the Bard. But he says he feels lucky.
“I’ve done quite a bit of Shakespeare now. Yeah, I enjoy it a lot, and so I feel very lucky that I’ve gotten to do so much of it.”
Shakespeare’s R&J runs Feb. 20-28 at West Village Theatre. Tickets are $30 online.