Romeo and Juliet

I was first introduced to Shakespeare through Romeo and Juliet. I attended Willard Middle School in Berkeley, California. My 7th grade teacher Verda Delp, who was a college theater major, focused on our ability to engage the poetry rather than comprehend the language. I was an adult when I finally understood how rare it was to receive Shakespeare as an artist/poet whose work was meant to move your soul and inspire your spirit, not to measure your aptitude or intelligence. I remember being immersed in the language and quickly making the connection through the rhyme and rhythm to the jazz and soul music that filled my home. I remember making a connection to the poetry and its similarity to hip-hop. I even wrote a poem inspired by the play. I was young enough to believe in the love story and to wish that the young couple would overcome the barriers that the adults created. I was devastated that they didn’t survive. I have always wanted to play Mercutio, and when the teacher asked us to choose scenes or monologues to perform from the play, I chose Mercutio’s death speech. I memorized it and performed it for the class in costume. This was before I understood what drama was or that theatre could be a profession.

Since that time, I have seen more productions than I can count: high school productions complete with pointy hats to the Outsiders/Grease version at the then-Berkeley Shakespeare Festival; I saw it on Broadway and I’ve seen countless university productions. I have read several adaptations of the play and I grew up listening to West Side Story. I have seen every movie version, with my favorite being the Franco Zeffirelli film that we watched in school. I even watched the British TV version that flips the status quo by setting it in an Afro-futurist world where the divisions are both racial and socioeconomic. 

I first fell in love with this play and this story nearly 40 years ago. I love that its adaptability is a reflection of its timelessness. Through Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare asked the British people to contemplate questions about our humanity and our capacity for empathy by presenting a story of two wealthy households embroiled in a generations-old feud in which neither family could remember the origins of the dispute. It teaches us that a society divided against itself cannot prosper. Yet we allow ourselves to live in a more polarized country in a more polarized world. As a society, we are more cynical and self-righteous, while our children continue to be slaughtered by violence and poverty. The vitriolic campaign against people—mainly children—seeking refuge and asylum reflects our base humanity.

I grew up in the West Coast during the ’80s. I lived through the impact of trickle-down economics and the cutting of funding to arts and humanities across the country. I grew up in Oakland when it had the highest number of homicides per capita in the country. I grew up at a time when teenage pregnancy was regarded as an epidemic, and young Black women and girls were demonized as “welfare queens” supposedly siphoning off resources they were deemed undeserving of. And I remember the ridiculous idea that the unhoused population was growing because people were moving to California to be homeless and not for better opportunities including jobs and housing. Those of us in the West Coast of this country live in the legacy of so-called Manifest Destiny and the promise, fulfilled or broken, of western expansion.

I have always been curious about this story against the backdrop of desperation instead of abundance. Romeo and Juliet was borrowed from an original story and rewritten to reflect current British society back to itself. I am following the Bard in that regard—seeking what modern or ancient lessons can be unlocked if I do the same.

—Nataki Garrett