"Jules"
Promenade Playhouse
Jan. 27 through March 4
It’s a simple conversion, really. Replace Verona with Kansas City, Mo., the “art thous” and “thees” with obscenities, toss in some contemporary ideological tension and voila! The modern day “Romeo and Juliet” is born.
Shakespeare would have been thrilled.
Perhaps it wasn’t quite that easy, but such is the timelessness of doomed love. Just ask the “Brokeback Mountain” guys: Love is rarely just about two people, and more often than not, it certainly doesn’t seem to conquer all.
“Jules,” the Promenade Playhouse’s update of the Bard’s classic love story, is, of course, no exception.
Based on the familiar premise of two star-crossed lovers, nobody seems to want Jules (Juliana Moreno) and Rahim (Ajay Satpute) to be together.
Though both are American, Jules is a member of the white picket-fenced, apple pie-loving, archetypal American dream, with an entire family history of enlisted men who have always stood up for their country, no matter what. Rahim, on the other hand, is more prone to carrying around a “Peace, Not War” sign. Oh, and did I mention he’s Muslim?
Pair this with a little bit of the naivete and good old-fashioned drama inherent in high school life, and it’s not hard to imagine what happens.
Think taking a bath in a pool of gasoline and deciding that it would be a good time to smoke a cigarette.
One of the great things about “Jules” is the way it avoids falling into any overly-cliched conflict.
Sure, Rahim is Muslim, and Jules is Christian. But that’s not really the problem. The main issue lies more within Rahim’s aggressively liberal leanings, which obviously doesn’t sit well with Jules’ brother, Ty (Christopher Goss), particularly after just having lost their other brother, Sam (Jonathan Walker) to the war in Iraq.
Rahim insists that lives lost in Iraq are in vain, while Jules and her family are trying to reconcile the idea that there was some meaning behind the death that their family has seen.
But even that might not have been so bad if Rahim hadn’t formerly dated Ty’s girlfriend, Rosie (Jessica Plotin).
Maybe Jules should have used more discretion before she agreed to kiss Rahim on a dare, but since when has love ever been rational, particularly at the age of 16?
The other great thing about “Jules” was the acting. Though they were squished onto a stage roughly the size of a rich person’s walk-in closet, everyone involved made great use of what they had at their disposal.
Juliana Moreno even managed to hold it down during her lengthy soliloquies through not only a sudden halting of background music, but also through one particularly charming audience member’s discussion about seating, which took place directly in the middle of a scene.
All this in a venue that holds a mere 63 seats, which, for those of us who don’t get out much, amounts to about the same number of people who show up for your “History of Math” lecture. One of the benefits of the small venue was the way it allowed for a certain intimacy with the actors on stage.
Watching Jules’ best friend Cindy (Tawny Mertes) contort her face into a variety of fascinating facial expressions was just as entertaining a feeling as though you had accidentally walked into someone’s room during some of the steamier make-out scenes.
And forget going to the bathroom: that would have involved walking out on to the stage and excusing yourself to the actors as you pushed by them.
Overall, “Jules” had all the elements of a wonderful theater experience.
It had the right blend of drama, passion, violence and love, all done by characters who, with the occasional exception of Rahim during his sappy speeches to Jules, weren’t horribly cheesy.
Because as long as we have love, we will have conflict, making “Jules” just as relevant now as it was when Shakespeare himself first wrote “Romeo and Juliet.”