Arts Alive San Antonio

By JASMINA WELLINGHOFF, Editor –

Stepping into the iconic roles of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet must be a huge challenge for most young actors, but Josh Davis and Alyx Gonzales don’t seem too intimidated. The two will portray the world’s most famous star-crossed lovers in the Classic Theater of San Antonio’s season opener Romeo and Juliet, which premieres Friday, Sept. 6 at the Deco District playhouse.

“Juliet is a character I’ve always wanted to play and hoped that one day it would come along, and it did,” said Gonzales before a recent rehearsal at the theater. “It feels like really big shoes to fill, it really does. This is such a well-known story! I’ve seen so many iterations of it, I can’t even tell you when I saw it for the first time.”

To prepare for the part, she is staying away from watching any videos or film clips, but she’s reading and rereading the play “constantly.” “It is currently the focus of everything I am doing,” she added. “When I am going to work in the morning, I am thinking about the rehearsal. Before I go to bed, I read my lines and my scenes. When I wake up in the morning that’s the first thing that pops into my head. I am dreaming in Shakespeare. It is everywhere in my life right now.”

Unlike Gonzales, Australian-born Davis says he never thought he would get to play Romeo and he never wanted to.  Now that he is playing him, however, he acknowledges that it can be “terrifying,” and also “such a blessing.” He is not a novice when it comes to Shakespeare, having acted in several of the Bard’s plays and, in fact, in Romeo and Juliet, too, in the role of Paris.

Now New-York-based, Davis was offered the part by Joe Goscinski, his teacher at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in the Big Apple, and the director of the current production. This is Goscinski’s third collaboration with the Classic. Last fall he directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream and in December, he came to coach local actors in 18^th century English upper-class speech for Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley.

This time, as the director of Romeo and Juliet, Goscinski is imparting his own stamp on the venerable play by setting it in a contemporary borderland community (Guess which one!) instead of the Italian city of Verona. As everyone probably knows, the reason Romeo and Juliet cannot be together is because their families, the Montagues and the Capulets, have been enemies for a long time, so long, in fact, that even their servants have become hostile to each other. By transposing the story into a closer-to-home environment, Goscinski hopes “that our audiences will see how blind hate and fear can make us, and how beautiful life can be when we find beauty in each other,” as he wrote in his promotional note.

“The Capulets and the Montagues represent a divided world, and in between those two sides we have two people, Romeo and Juliet, who love each other,” he said. “I want the actors to allow their characters’ feelings to resonate through their bodies – to breathe in the circumstances of their lives – and to respond to those feelings with such truth that Shakespeare’s words create an effect in the audience, allowing the audience to experience the world of Romeo and Juliet.”  That world is at first full of conflict and intolerance but the audience eventually gets to see the transformative power of love. “They get to be eyewitnesses to how love can induce people to change,” noted the director.

Not all the action will be on stage, however. The theater’s walls will be part of it, too, as both the actors/characters and audience members will be invited to produce graffiti expressing their feelings about the play’s themes or related topics. It is hoped that even these will change over the course of the evening.

 And there will be fighting on stage, of course, not with 16^th century swords but with a variety of ordinary objects, including pipes, lids and a trash bin. In fact, the action starts with a big brawl.

So, is it a bit of a challenge to speak Shakespearean verses while clad in jeans and tees? The question made both Davis and Gonzales laugh appreciatively. “Yeah! Yeah,” admitted Gonzales, “but I think it works. The themes are universal: love, hate, boundaries, seeing each other’s point of view, reconciliation.”

Goscinski said Davis and Gonzales were his first choice for the lead roles. “Alyx and I worked together last year, here at the Classic, and I know Josh from New York. He is one of our best students, He’ll be a great Romeo. You’ve got to have actors with some serious chops and a desire to open themselves up.” And actors who cherish the gift Shakespeare bestowed on generations of actors.

 “What we have learned from Joe is that everything is in the language, said Davis. “Shakespeare knew a lot about human nature and he didn’t do things just to do them. Every word he put in, he put in for a reason. As you read the text, you see where the ideas are coming from and that informs your acting. He (the playwright) does a lot of the acting for you.”

Gonzales agreed. “Sometimes I tend to get too emotional as Juliet and Joe has helped me to rely on the words themselves to convey meaning, to let the language do the job,” she explained.

Some of those words resonate with her in a very special way, like the lines that Juliet speaks while anxiously waiting for her beloved to come to her: “When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun.”

“These words so encapsulate an all-consuming love, said the actress.

Romeo and Juliet, Sept. 6-29; Classic Theater of San Antonio, 1924 Fredericksburg Rd.; 210-589-8450, www.ClasicTheatre.org