Is love a tender thing?  It is too rough,
Too rude, too boisterous; and it pricks like thorn.
-Romeo

I’m not burying the lead with this one.  The City Equity Theatre‘s version of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair(e?) de Lune is a good play and well done by a talented and appropriate cast – Tyler Layton and Jonathan Fuller.  I highly recommend it, even at $26.50.  I gave with my hands; my friend gave of her eyes.

I finished re-reading Romeo and Juliet yesterday and find it oddly relevant.  Where Romeo and Juliet is all about young love, Frankie and Johnny explores the possibility of romance after experience.  Further, Johnny – a simple restaurant cook – quotes from Shakespeare throughout the play.

My child is yet a stranger in the world,
She hath not seen the change of fourteen years….
-Juliet’s father

I can’t remember if I’ve seen Romeo and Juliet on a stage, but I’ve watched a few movie versions.  And, recently, Shakespeare in Love.  These productions always conceive of the star-cross’d lovers as an archetypal and idealized epitome of love.  Something to strive and long for.  But I was struck, at thirty-three, by the fact that Juliet is thirteen and Romeo couldn’t possibly be much older.  Kids!  Just kids!  Now I have the view that Shakespeare’s concept of the central tragedy is that otherwise responsible adults allowed these two to take a puppy love so seriously.  Heck, Juliet might be stuck somewhere between Hannah Montana and Twilight if she had been around in 2009.

Dost thou love me? I know thou wilt say ‘Ay’;
And I will take thy word. Yet, if thou swear’st,
Thou mayst prove false; at lovers’ perjuries,
They say, Jove laughs.
-Juliet

Romeo is innocently insincere – like Robert Ringer’s Type Number Three.  He thinks he’s true, but Shakespeare lets us know right from the beginning that he can’t be taken seriously.  In Act One, he’s desperately in love with some chick off-stage named Rosaline:

I am too sore empierced with [Cupid's] shaft
To soar with his light feathers; and so bound
I cannot bound a pitch above dull woe:
Under love’s heavy burden do I sink.
-Romeo

Is he fourteen here?  Fifteen?  Do we take a tenth grader so seriously when he complains of “love’s heavy burden”?  There are all sorts of indications that Romeo is immature on the subject of love and maybe chasing every pretty, unattainable girl in Verona:

Come, he hath hid himself among these trees,
To be consorted with the humorous night:
Blind is his love and best befits the dark.
-Benvolio

Romeo:
Lady, by younder blessed moon I vow
That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops-
Juliet:
O swear not by the moon, th’ inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.

Holy Saint Francis, what a change is here!
Is Rosaline, whom thou didst love so dear,
So soon forsaken? Young men’s love then lies
Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.
Jesu Maria! What a deal of brine
Hath wash’d thy sallow cheeks for Rosaline;
How much salt water thrown away in waste,
To season love, that of it doth not taste!
-Friar Laurence

Although Johnny quotes the Shakespeare, Frankie more fully seems to understand the Bard’s wisdom.  Johnny pursues her with Romeo’s intense passion but she repeatedly shrinks away, armed with the experience of the thousand other Romeos that came before.  After a certain age and any number of botched attempts, love has a wariness like chasing deer in the woods.  It’s too easy to get hurt if you’re not always wearing armor or running away.  The actors share some sparkling on-stage moments recreating the romantic tension between falling and stopping.

Wisely and slow: they stumble that run fast.
-Friar Laurence

A final note on applause.  When I went to see Rhinoceros with Theatre UAB, the show ended so abruptly, the audience had no idea whether to leave or clap their hands.  At the Bottletree Thermals show, the audience did the routine rock concert hoot and holler, but the band refused to come back for an encore.  Perhaps the biggest compliment I can relate about the City Equity Theatre’s production of Frankie and Johnny is that it’s been a long time since I’ve heard such spontaneous and persistent applause – at both intermission and at the finale – from a theatre audience.  Maybe it was an all-friends-and-family audience, but I don’t think so.  It’s a joy to keep clapping because you enjoyed it and everyone else around you likewise can’t hold back their enthusiasm.

Thanks so much to Director Dennis McLernon, Jonathan Fuller, the City Equity Theatre, and the Virginia Samford Theatre.

I think a woman brushing and fixing her hair is one of the supremely great sights of life.  I’d put it up there with the Grand Canyon and a mother nursing her child.  Triumphant facts of nature.
-Johnny