In a black-box theater so small it could induce claustrophobia in the unwary – the house holds only 20 seats – Shakespeare’s classic love story “Romeo and Juliet” is getting a new retelling.
“The Madhouse in Mantua, or Romeo’s Magical Dream,” presented by the Feed the Herd theater company at the Trilogy Theater in midtown, is an ambitious re-editing of one of the most famous of dramatic texts.
The premise of this performance (elaborately set up in the program notes, because the performance itself never does) is that Romeo survived the carnage at the end of “Romeo and Juliet.” He recovered from the poison served up by that apothecary, who apparently wasn’t so true after all. Upon waking, he found Juliet dead (again), went insane, and was confined to an asylum in Mantua.
(That’s right, in Mantua, not in fair Verona where we lay our scene, because -- as the program points out -- in addition to the attempted suicide Romeo also murdered two Veronese dignitaries, Tybalt Capulet and County Paris.)
Now Romeo, played by Kevin Kaine – also the creator of the piece – finds himself in a bare cell, outfitted only with a cot, a white sheet, and a strangely elaborate cell door (designed by Tom Lee) that looks distractingly like Frank Lloyd Wright’s take on asylum architecture.
The text of the performance is taken entirely from “Romeo and Juliet,” ; but Kaine has tossed Shakespeare’s work in a blender: It’s delivered in non-linear form, some parts are stutteringly repeated, others entirely excised. As far as this viewer could determine, we only hear Romeo’s lines from the original play. The exception to this rule is when the only other performer, Eric Michael Kochmer, appears, as an asylum orderly whose words are taken from Tybalt’s lines.
The tormented Romeo, skittering around his cell, sometimes believes that Juliet is still alive and with him. This is conveyed by the famous “Palm to palm is holy palmer’s kiss” passage from the original text, with Kaine playing the lines to a hand-puppet Juliet.
Whenever Romeo becomes comfortably engaged in this fantasy, however, his caretakers at the asylum interrupt his delusions – either with a klaxon and blinking red lights, or by sending Tybalt to inject him with a mysterious drug delivered with a giant hypodermic.
Kaine’s aim in presenting this julienned version of a familiar text seems to be an examination of what happens to love in the absence of the beloved. Whenever Romeo is knocked out of his delirium, he is enraged and despairing. He tries to kill himself, and repeats the lines: “O brawling love! O loving hate! O any thing of nothing first create…feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health, still-waking sleep that is not what it is!” Passion that survives the death of the desired is just such an oxymoron – or at least that appears to be Kaine’s premise.
It’s an intriguing idea, turning the stage’s most iconic romance into a meditation on radical loneliness.
And the execution of the idea sometimes works. Kaine gives an energetic and passionately physical performance; Kochmer is alluringly menacing as the near-mute, vicious Tybalt. Especially within the confines of the tiny space, their cat-and-mouse chase is arresting, even without dialogue.
At times, Romeo’s fantasy of regress into an idealized love affair can be quite unexpectedly moving, particularly when Aron Deyo’s extremely clever light and sound design supplies the place of all the rest of Shakespeare’s characters with spotlights and bells. These scenes constitute a potently well-dramatized suggestion that falling in love is always a process of seeing something permanent in ephemeral flashes of light and distant chimes.
But other scenes are simply confusing. The passages of Shakespeare’s original text don’t always serve Kaine’s purposes, and occasionally they just seem meaningless when divorced from their original context, so much rococo verbiage. Limiting the text of “Madhouse” to the spliced dialogue of “Romeo and Juliet” also means that Kaine is forced to rely on props, pantomime and those expository program notes to make some plot points that would be much more simply made with a few original lines – or perhaps Kaine just needed to steal different lines from the bard of Avon.
The final segments of the performance, during which Romeo takes a massive dose of the drug that the orderly, Tybalt, is pushing, remain muddled: Is this Romeo’s final and successful suicide attempt? Or is he surrendering his fantasies to return to the real world? Or is the point that there isn’t much of a difference between those two options?
While “Madhouse” is a challenging and at times opaque performance, Kaine’s ambition is certainly to be admired. Anyone who loves the original should enjoy this production’s compelling, darkly shadowed recasting of some of the English language’s most well-known love poetry.
And if the whole thing is just too depressing, you can always follow up a visit to the Trilogy Theater with a stop at Blockbuster as an antidote – just pick up “Shakespeare in Love,” Tom Stoppard’s much more cheerful take on re-reading the Bard’s best romance.
“The Madhouse in Mantua” plays Friday and Saturday nights at 8 p.m. at the Trilogy Theater, 341 West 44th Street, 2nd Floor. For reservations, call (212) 501-2282 or log onto www.feedtheherd.org; tickets, $10.