The New Yorker Radio Hour - Sam Gold’s “Romeo + Juliet” Is Shakespeare for the Youth

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

Sam Gold has directed five Shakespeare tragedies, but his latest, “Romeo + Juliet,” is something different—a loud, clubby production designed to attract audiences the age of its protagonists. ��It’s as if the teens from ‘Euphoria’ decided that they had to do Shakespeare,” Vinson Cunningham said, “and this is what they came up with.” The production stars Rachel Zegler, who starred in Steven Spielberg’s remake of “West Side Story,” and Kit Connor, of the Gen Z Netflix hit “Heartstopper,” and features music by Jack Antonoff. Gold, who cut his teeth doing experimental theatre with the venerable downtown company the Wooster Group, bristles at the view that his production is unfaithful to the original. “A lot of people falsely sort of label me as a deconstructionist or something, because they’re wearing street clothes,” he tells Cunningham. “I’m not deconstructing these plays. I’m doing the play. . . . I think it’s a gross misunderstanding of the difference between conventions and authentic engagement in a text.” Gold aspires to excite kids to get off their phones. “We are in a mental-health crisis [of] teen suicide. I’m doing a play about teen suicide, and all those young people are coming. And I think we can help them.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Vincent Cunningham, a staff writer for The New Yorker. There have been at least 37 different productions of Romeo and Juliet on Broadway. Not to mention countless high school productions. Maybe you were in one. I don't know. But this new one by the director Sam Gold is kind of a dark,

clubby, Gen Z, Romeo and Juliet. It's as if the teens from Euphoria decided that they had to do Shakespeare, and this is what they came up with. The two stars are Rachel Ziegler, who you probably know from the latest movie version of West Side Story,

and Kit Connor, who's from the teen Netflix hit Heartstopper. I wanted to talk to Sam Gold, partly just because I really admire his work, but also because I always have this question when someone does Romeo and Juliet, and the question is, why now? Gold has famously directed five of Shakespeare's great tragedies, and it seems that he's kind of working through something about Shakespeare in public in front of all of us.

So I wanted to understand why Romeo and Juliet, why now, and how he came up with this totally interesting, totally bonkers production. How does Sam Gold find his way into the middle of this mess? What makes you decide to do Romeo and Juliet now? I want to think that in this moment, after the pandemic, and after people have had enough years completely addicted to their phones, that young people are starting to really crave theater. I just was filled with the desire to make something for,

young people. And I could see, you know, it was the spring and I was seeing November 5th coming, you know, we have this election. What if I tried to open a play around the election that was going to sort of put a fire under young people about what's really, really hard about life right now? Yeah. And I immediately thought of Romeo and Juliet, you know, two households, both alike and dignities. That's the first two lines of the play. It's like we're more the same than we are different. Yeah. And theater becomes this place where we can come together, even if you feel really differently than the person sitting next to you about who you're going to vote for, you breed that same air. And Romeo and Juliet's a play where Shakespeare is sort of

sacrificing these two kids with the idea that maybe the adults, would wake up a bit to the ways they're hurting each other unnecessarily. That's kind of like the thesis of that play. Right. Well, you know, it's funny that you framed the play in that way, right? And I've always thought of Romeo and Juliet as a play about young people, but not necessarily as one for young people. There were so many, especially young women in the crowd that I went to,

there was certainly like a sort of fan aspect of like, we know these people, we're excited for them. One sort of subtext of the play was, Kit Conner's triceps are very prominently displayed all play along. But, you know, it just seemed to have this like very

populist feeling where the people in the audience are being interacted with are offering their emotions, their size, their sort of exclamations. What was your theory of audience in making this show? I was like, what if we make a show where that generation of audience member feels spoken to, feels like this is for me, feels like I can come to this, I feel oriented. And then what you give them is Shakespeare.

They want to be there and they want to take in this ritual that really reflects something deep about our society. And they do. Sort of 18 to 25 is sort of our audience. Yeah. And they are laughing at 400-year-old jokes. They are hearing the wit, the poetry, the rhymes, the scantion, the sonnets, and they are responding to the language. They're not laughing at Kitt's triceps.

They're laughing at Shakespeare. You know, they're really hearing the play. So that was the goal. It was never to be... I did not mean to denigrate Kitt's Triceps. It's not to be cynical. I wanted the world on stage to reflect the world that that generation of audience member experiences in life, which is what Shakespeare did. Shakespeare was a populist, and Shakespeare was putting plays on to communicate very directly with his popular audience.

The jokes were of the moment. There's a song referenced in Romeo and Juliet, the nurse's servant Peter after everybody thinks Juliet's dead, says to the music. because they're always live musicians in a Shakespeare play, and they sort of break the fourth wall, and Peter says to the musician that is underscoring the Shakespeare play, will you play heart's ease because my heart is full and we need a silly dump to comfort us? So I use a pop song from this generation's vocabulary

because that's what Shakespeare was doing. He was taking a song everybody knew and making a joke using it to lighten the mood on stage. And that's what I'm doing. It's not cynical. It's genuinely trying to do for a young audience now what I firmly believe is what Shakespeare was trying to do with his audience.

How sweet. You're a man of the house to me. I window and I see the good in you, good in me. That's who you are and what I need. You, Sam, you've directed now all five of Shakespeare's tragedies, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet, and now Romeo and Juliet. And has this been a project for you? Because you've also done, you've worked on Ibsen, you've worked on other things. But has this Shakespeare sort of visitation for you?

Do you conceive of it as one project? Yes. And, you know, my sort of mentor coming up was the director Elizabeth Lecompt. And the way Liz would work is... From the Worcester Group. Yes, sorry. The Worcester Group. What she does is when she gets to the end of a project,

she starts the next project sort of from there. Like the set from one project becomes kind of the raw materials to start making the next one. Like they're all sort of flowing one to the next. On these Shakespeare's, it really goes back to a feeling I had when I was in school. I went to grad school at Juilliard. And there were these really young, companies of actors. And they, you know, they lived and breath, you know, 24 hours a day they were

together. They knew each other so well. They were all having sex with each other and breaking up and getting drunk at night in their dorm rooms and then getting up at seven in the morning to do fitness class. And, you know, they were like, they were just so in it with each other. You know, that is ensemble. And when I was at school, I just loved making these plays with these young ensembles. So I've been trying to do that with these. Shakespeare's to bring these ensembles together. And they all, all five of them come from that same place. They all were, I don't know, almost like kind of rough and ready school plays.

Does the makeup of that ensemble, who's in it, what kind of ideas and physicality and everything that they bring, is that something that develops in conjunction with that ensemble? Or do you, as a director, show up with a concept, I want to try this thing, let's see how this works? How does the idea develop, the thing that makes, I don't know, your Macbeth different than other Macbeth? I'm really inspired by specific actors. So, you know, Gabby Beans came into audition, and all of a sudden it's like Mercutio and the friar.

Yeah. And, you know, what if Gabby is kind of Shakespeare, kind of the storyteller, kind of like holding it down for us, the MC? Yeah. That idea of Gabby as a kind of the emcee of the eve. that's just Gabby. That's me responding to her talent. We talked already about notions of sort of what is the popular or what is the sort of the broad audience. You mentioned earlier the Worcester Group, which is this downtown New York experimental avant-garde theater company. Another, I don't know, I want to say benefit that they have, but a particularity is the idea of a small audience that

coming for something that is self-consciously an experiment. Yeah. And you working this stuff out on Broadway, which is a very different notion of what it means to be a director, very different notion of audience, very different prerogatives. How does it feel to do all the things that you're talking about on Broadway, which is the broadest audience possible? A lot of people falsely sort of label me as like a deconstructionist or something because like they're wearing street clothes.

Does that piss you off when people do it? It does piss me off because, well, it doesn't piss me off, but it's sad that they don't really know what they're saying when they're attributing that to me. I'm not deconstructing these plays. I'm doing the play. Right. You know, I've done plays where I think Ben Brantley said the playwright was rolling in his grave, which, you know, it's not the most original piece of criticism.

I think it's a gross misunderstanding of the difference. between conventions and authentic engagement in a text. Right. Just because they're not wearing the frills or whatever does not mean that you have therefore, like, sort of desecrated the play. Yeah, we have conventions, right? When you're going to go see an Ibsen play,

this is what you picture it looking like. Right. And those things come, those expectations come from some other successful period of theater history. You know, Richard Ayer does enough beautiful Ibsen plays at the Royal National Theater in the 90s. And then we think of Ibsen as when we close our eyes, we see some Richard Ayr production. But it's 40 years later, 30 years later, and that's a convention.

It's not like that production was born in the mind of Ibsen. Exactly. It has nothing to do with it. And I'm actually just reading the play and engaging in the play. And I'm doing a ton of homework on what Elizabethan theater was like, what Elizabethan culture was like, what Elizabethan politics were like. I'm understanding what's going on. in religious battles and political battles of the time. And then I'm thinking about what the playwright was trying to do vis-a-vis all those things

and thinking about our own world and how that play could best affect the audience that doesn't have those politics from 400 years ago has a different set of politics. So, I mean, with Romeo and Juliet, there will be people that think I have the sound too loud. You know? The sound is loud. It's loud. It's fun. It's loud in there.

And there will be audience members that say, that is too loud. Yeah. That's fine with me because I have an interest in connecting this text to this specific audience that does not think it's too loud.

Right. And I'm willing to hear the complaints because I have a sort of risk tolerance that I think has come from starting downtown. That's the director, Sam Gold, talking about the new Broadway production of Romeo and Juliet. We'll be right back in a moment.

I'm Vincent Cunningham, a staff writer here at The New Yorker, and I've been talking with the director, Sam Gold, about this latest new production of Romeo and Juliet. We'll continue our conversation now. Does staging something in the round change your whole conception visually as a director? What is just, I've always wondered, yeah. The reason why I really love it is the Presidium theaters, the Broadway theaters, they were built in the 19th century

with the idea that there was going to be an actor, standing downstage center declaiming. Yeah. I'm happy to see Ethel Merman stand down center. Like, if I could be taken back in time, I would enjoy going to those shows. It's not that I dislike it. It's that it's an old convention. And because of technological advances, it doesn't really make sense for every play to be done that way.

A proscenium doesn't really speak to how a contemporary audience will best engage with storytelling live. And the round is much closer. You get this sort of over-the-shoulder shot that you're used to in a film, and you get intimacy that film has given us to actors. Like, after the close-up, it's hard to sit at the back of a thousand-seat, two-thousand-seat theater. And at Circle in the Square, everybody's in a close-up. There's no bads, there are zero bad seats at Circle and And so you get that experience, because I'm trying to do these plays that I'm saying they're kind of grief rituals, right? We're trying to depict a trauma so that the audience can process their own trauma. That's sort of the basic idea.

And I think they work a lot better when you can have intimacy, when you can feel close to the actors, when you can feel them breathe. So to me, the smaller the theater, the closer you can be to the actors, the more I'm able to do my job. People are increasingly engrossed in screens. Obviously, film precedes all the problems we think about with smartphones and everything. But what is the primary relationship between what you do and what shows up on screens in terms of TV and film? I mean, mostly what I'm doing is I'm trying to tell a story live with people and use every tool I can to make it as powerful as possible. And film is now deeply embedded in our psyche. But like there were all sorts of other kinds of popular entertainments, culture, storytelling that he's engaging with.

So I'm just doing what I feel like Shakespeare's doing, you know, wit. This idea in Elizabeth in England, it's like a game, a sport, a thing to do after school. How are we to understand that when they, when Romeo and Mercutio and Benvolio wit as a verb, how do we going to feel the sort of after-school activity of it, the way Shakespeare's society did? And so I'm trying to pull from a toolbox, and one is film, you know. I kept referencing Quentin Tarantino during the Romeo and Juliet rehearsals. Really?

That's a populist, a populist adventurous artist, right? There's something about the way Shakespeare works. That sort of reminds me a little bit about the way Quentin Tarantino works. They have some things in common about, willingness to go from something serious to something funny and back quickly. So you say like, oh, how am I going to do this? How am I going to go from the super sad moment to this funny moment? And you think, oh, people aren't going to be able to do that. They won't be able to ride that wave. We don't do that anymore. But then I think, no, we do. Like in a Tarantino movie, we do.

Right? So I use film that way. You know, one thing that Shakespeare has in common with, this is not something that I was ever primed to think about, that Shakespeare has in common with Quentin Tarantino. is that they are both adept at using the stories of their time. This is a long way of asking what it was like working with Jeremy Strong, who appears in one of the great stories of our time succession when you work with him on enemy of the people. You know, you work with somebody that, like, comes from a world of reference.

Like, this is the guy who played Kendall Roy. Is that something that I'm using with this person? Is it something that I'm trying to strip away? I think I've maybe over-emphasized that what we are making will stand alone, and people will just enter. They'll suspend their disbelief, and they will stop seeing Kendall Roy the second Jeremy enters, and they will start seeing Thomas Stockman. I don't know that that's always been successful, because you can't rip that away from people. And listen, theater is too obsessed with celebrity, but it's also saying. saving the theater from financial ruin to be so obsessed with celebrity.

And listen, Jeremy Strong was a brilliant actor 20 years before he was in Succession. He and I have done multiple plays together. We grew up together. We've been friends since college. I don't think of him as Kendall Roy from Succession at all. That's like very low on my list of references in my mind to the work of Jeremy Strong. So maybe I underestimated that most people's relationship to Jeremy is much different than mine. Right.

And I didn't really think about Kendall Roy. And maybe I should have. Yeah, no, I was thinking about this as I watched, again, in an amazing way, those young people who are at Roman and Juliet at the end just like swarming the exits waiting to receive Rachel and Kit. And I wondered, what came into my mind is, you know, whether there is any difference, whether there needs to be any difference, between. sort of the function of the audience, as we classically understand it in theater, and the new word that we have, which is like fandom,

and whether that at all is something that sort of is in the fringes of your consciousness as you make your work. I mean, I don't think it's new at all, you know? True, yes. We have made this term. You know, when Richard Burton was playing Hamlet and Elizabeth Taylor would sit in the balcony

to watch everyone would. line up around the fucking block to try to see Liz Taylor. Yeah. Right? They weren't coming for Richard Burton's Hamlet. They were coming to see Elizabeth Taylor. And that's always been the case. And I think it was the case in Shakespeare's time.

And there's nothing I'm enjoying more right now than the fact that there's 19-year-old audience members hearing and understanding the poetry of Shakespeare and then being so excited at the end that they want to stand for an hour to meet the person. the person that delivered that language. And I do think that's part of it. Part of it is that they love Heart Stopper. Part of it is that they're addicted to their phones. But part of it is that the play lit them up. But I don't think it's a bad thing for the theater that these young people are, I mean, our stage door is crazy.

I saw it, dude. And I don't think that's a bad thing. No, it seemed like a sign of health. It seems, you know, yeah, I'm just wondering. Yeah, like if those people come see another play, people need theater. Yes. We know we need to get in a room and tell stories. It is not good.

No one thinks, like the surgeon general is telling you, it is not good to be at home looking at social media all the time. We are in a mental health crisis, teen suicide. I'm doing a play about teen suicide, right? I'm doing a play about teen suicide. Right. And all those young people are coming. And I think we can help them. That can be good.

Well, Sam, thank you so much for these interpretations, this work, and for talking to us. This is great. Thank you so much. That's the director, Sam Gold, talking about the latest revival of Romeo and Juliet, which is now playing on Broadway at the Circle in the Square Theater. And that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. I'm Vincent Cunningham, a staff writer at The New Yorker. And, by the way, I'm also one of the co-hosts of the New Yorker's weekly culture podcast, critics at large. New episodes drop every Thursday.

David Remnick will be back on Friday. Thanks for listening. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance

from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccan. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.