QUESTIONING THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM AND RECKONING WITH THE MOMENT IN ROMEO & JULIET: LOUISVILLE 2020
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city divided by an ancient grudge. Brawls erupting in the streets. A government threatening brutal force to maintain order. And a deadly plague on the rise as tensions boil. In the midst of this unrest, Shakespeare’s young lovers, the children of sworn enemies, dare to imagine a world where hearts are not ruled by hatred. Unfolding in a vibrant alternate universe that reimagines the classic story alongside our troubled moment, Romeo & Juliet: Louisville 2020 is a resonant retelling that illuminates how history reverberates in the present. Featuring a cast working together virtually from around the country, the production combines wonderful performances with new media technologies, ranging from documentary footage to video art and animation. As rehearsals and filming got underway, Executive Artistic Director Robert Barry Fleming, the director of this adventurous undertaking, spoke with Dramaturg Amy Wegener about the ideas fueling his production—which envisions the Montagues and the Capulets as prominent families, one Black and the other White, caught in deeply rooted animosity. Amy Wegener: Could you share your thoughts about the relationship between Romeo & Juliet and Louisville 2020? How do you see Shakespeare’s story in conversation with this time and place? Robert Barry Fleming: By imagining a heightened contemporary world for the play, I’m bringing this tale from the 16th century into, perhaps, a more immediate conversation, and that’s very purposeful—not in an effort to valorize Eurocentrism, but to say, “How is our experience shaped by the history informing this moment?” In some ways it’s still 1870, after Reconstruction—where Jim Crow and Black Codes allowed wanton lynching of Black folks without protection. That’s the kind of thing we’ve seen with George Floyd and Breonna Taylor: that Black people can still be terrorized and killed without recourse. That the laws on the books are insufficient to provide justice, due to a longstanding legacy of injustice and the attendant relentless interpersonal enmity that seems so difficult to source. So when you think about this ancient grudge, that no one really remembers how it started since it’s become so normalized, the awakening because of a tragedy evidences a connection between the Shakespearean narrative and the contemporary story. The intersection of race (a social construct not 17
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