"Romeo and Juliet"
William Shakespeare
Harvard College, 1979
The spring of my sophomore year of college, I played Benvolio in a fairly straightforward staging of "Romeo & Juliet." In retrospect, it was a classic case of typecasting -- the nice, dependable fellow who is a little befuddled by the events that overtake him and those he loves.
A notable piece of trivia about this production was that Mercutio was played by Jonathan Prince, a native of Beverly Hills who returned to southern California after graduation and almost immediately landed a recurring role in the series "Mr. Merlin" as the character Leo Samuels. In 2002-2003, he would be the creator, executive producer, and sometime writer of the wonderful but unfortunately short-lived series about a family in the early 1960s called "American Dreams."
In the photo at right, the three buddies, Romeo, Mercutio, and Benvolio are clowning in Act II, scene iv: "A sail, a sail!" "Two: a shirt and a smock."
And here, not long after, Mercutio has sustained his mortal wound from Tybalt and is dying in my arms, looking up at Romeo and berating him: "Why the dev'l came you between us? / I was hurt under your arm."
Oddly enough, what I remember most vividly about this production was a moment in rehearsal when someone in the cast observed how odd it was that we, a bunch of Americans, were trying to fake British accents for a show that takes place in Italy . . . whereupon a rash of stupid Italian accents broke out in rehearsal. One of my character's critical speeches thus came out: "Oh, Romeo, Romeo, brave-a Mercutio, he's-a dead-a!"
I believe all these photographs were shot by the director, Valerie Lester.
WHAT THEY SAID
"...the show is a farcical shadow of Shakespeare's play. The actors try to sink themselves into the pure emotion of the story and pay no attention to the words they use." -- "Wherefore Art?" The Harvard Crimson (unsigned), April 25, 1979
"The show is good, if unspectacular. ...presented with this wonderful dialogue, actors tend to fall into the trap of speaking with affected accents, and this cast proves no exception, too often getting caught up in the rhyme of the words and not often enough in the reason. Characters slip in and out of English accents and affected tones as frequently as they cross the line between seriousness and buffoonery. ...David Loftus and Mario Aieta solidly portray Benvolio and Paris as men swept under by emotions they cannot comprehend." -- " 'Romeo' by Any Name Would Smell Sweet," Brian Meyer, The Harvard Independent, April 26, 1979