Trinity Repertory Company is touring a new production of Romeo and Juliet this summer. The production is a first for the company; it’s being performed in both English and Spanish.
Director Tyler Dobrowsky assembles his actors around the rehearsal stage at Trinity Rep in downtown Providence. One by one, they begin reciting the prologue, which lays out the famous story of Romeo and Juliet. The actors speak first in Spanish, then in English, their voices weaving the two languges together. As the play progresses, all the characters speak a mix of English and Spanish, sometimes switching mid-sentence.
23-year-old Maeli Goren plays Juliet. She’s a native English speaker, but she works as an English as a second language teacher in Providence.
“More than 90 percent of my kids were from Spanish speaking countries, and they quickly caught me up,” said Goren. “So my Spanish is pretty confident now.”
This is also Goren’s professional stage debut. Unlike other productions, Trinity Rep is using actors from its roster, as well as from the community. Goren says she’s thinking about her students when she’s on stage.
“They so often feel like outsiders when they’re seeing any kind of performance, and they get messages in all kinds of forms in the media, and even their experience in school, that tells them that they are outsiders here, and they need to do something to change themselves to fit in,” said Goren.
26 year-old Orlando Hernandez plays Romeo. For him, the play creates a sort of third language: a combination of English and Spanish. And Hernandez says that reflects the demographics of Providence, which is nearly 40 percent Latino, according to the latest census.
“The fact is there are parts of Providence where you walk around, and over where I live in South Providence, and Spanish is more of the language you hear than English,” said Hernandez.
But deciding just when English and Spanish are part of Romeo and Juliet’s world was tough says Director Tyler Dobrowsky, who helped adapt the Bard.
“In some ways it’s almost like in a musical when someone breaks into song,” said Dobrowsky. “With Romeo and Juliet, the two main characters, when they need to express their love for each other, they will speak it in Spanish.”
Dobrowsky says the characters also use Spanish to conceal their feelings.
“For example, when Juliet doesn’t want her father to hear about what she’s doing,” said Dobrowsky. “She’ll speak in Spanish to her nurse to sort of keep it a secret.”
The actors use a formal Spanish, meant to mirror the flowery Shakespearean English. But everything else in the production is modern, from the costumes to the music. Dobrowsky says he wants the play to be approachable, to open up Shakespeare to Spanish and English speakers alike.
His Romeo, Hernandez, says he’d like to get city kids hooked on the Early Modern playwright.
“I guess I would hope that it could be a sort of nice gateway drug, to Shakespeare,” said Hernandez. “Could be a kind of way of relating to something that a lot of the time can be sort of up in the clouds if you don’t have reasons to relate to it.”
“We say you cannot die without having known Shakespeare, and the most popular play that he wrote, or story that he wrote is Romeo and Juliet,” said Marta Martinez, the head of Rhode Island Latino Arts.
The organization partnered with Trinity Rep to stage the production. Martinez says while it is chance to introduce Shakespeare to a new audience, it’s also an opportunity to showcase the culture Latinos are bringing to the city.
“I think it’s a way to really understand and learn about the contributions that Latinos have to the arts in Rhode Island, which is an important conversation in itself.”
And as the Latino population continues to grow in the state, Martinez believes it’s more and more likely that conversation will play out on the stage.
