This Lady Capulet is the matriarch of a conservative family, living in a place “where the act of speaking Spanish can be violent and punishable,” Ali says. In this production, the Hispanic Romeo can only speak his native tongue at home and is reprimanded by his cousin Benvolio for daring to do so anywhere else. Juliet learns Spanish from a household servant, Pedro (a minor character, Peter, in the original), and the language becomes the lovers’ secret code. The two find solace through their connection.
Ali has developed something of a track record of using multiple languages in his productions. His bilingual audio play Romeo y Julieta, which was released as a podcast during the pandemic, starred Nyong’o and Juan Castano. Now, Ali concedes, the approach “didn’t say anything conceptual about the story.” But the director fine-tuned the idea for his refugee-crisis-inflected production of Twelfth Night last year, in which the private use of Swahili connected select characters as they made their way in a foreign land.
Ali understands Shakespeare’s brilliance lies in the malleability of his works. “Why do we keep coming back to these characters whose fates we know?” Ali asks. He remembers seeing Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet in a Nairobi cinema, with the baby-faced Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes gazing at each other through a fish tank. “You don’t need text when you have such a strong visual,” he says. Ali calls West Side Story, the 1957 musical set among dueling New York gangs, the piece’s “most glorious adaptation and translation,” recognizable without replicating each specific element. He shares a passion with Aikens for the haunting score of Franco Zeffirelli’s faithful 1968 movie.
“Even at her young age, she’s unsatisfied,” Aikens says. The actor’s eyes roll up in gentle empathy. “Part of her is grieving that she hasn’t yet been able to live or decide what she wants, and then she meets Romeo and, finally, it’s like she can survive through this love.” The two are coming up in an imperiled world, and Aikens, while proud of her accomplishment, sees her casting as almost “a new kind of stunt—we’re so used to seeing celebrities and people with established careers in these roles.” She says she’ll have to work a little to believe that she didn’t trick someone into giving her the part.
“Right, right,” Hernández says, gently curtailing this line of thought. “I think what’s great, at least what helps me, is thinking I’m not alone. We’re in this together.”
In this story: hair, Edward Lampley; makeup, Mark Carrasquillo; tailor, Tae Yoshida for Carol Ai Studio Tailors.
Produced by Boom Productions Inc.
