Romeo & Juliet
July 12–27, 2024
NC Stage theatre space, 15 Stage Lane, Asheville NC
photos by Eliza Alden Heath
Nemesis has accomplished a triumph with this production. If Shakespeare is folk music, this is a cover that forces you to hear the melodies anew.
Daniel Walton, Asheville Stages review
Nearly everyone is familiar with Romeo and Juliet – Shakespeare’s fan-fiction smash hit: star-crossed lovers, embattled families, beleaguered clergy, meddlesome parents, love, loss, exile, poison, and the happiest dagger in stage history. How do you reimagine one of Shakespeare’s most famous, most beloved works? How can this production be in conversation with 427 years’ worth of previous choices?
Nemesis strove to look at R&J with fresh eyes, to make a version unique to 2024. We ended up with an adult, enby Juliet, taking their first steps into a world turned unfamiliar. We found an adult Romeo who never knew what love could really be, beyond what novels told him. Together they create their own kind of innocence. We had a feud everyone was tired of except Tybalt, parents blindsided by their kid’s transition, a transmasc County Paris looking to show Juliet what life on their own terms could look like.
And once we had created this fresh, new, exciting, relevant love story—I found myself profoundly unwilling to murder them before they had a chance to test their love out. Our play dipped into the metatextual with three endings: Shakespeare’s, Da Porto’s, and Melon’s, where the lovers pretend to be dead as Friar Lawrence guides their families through the tomb, and then sneak out the back door.
As always, we made visible the invisible (Rosaline the influencer), leaned hard into humor, embraced ad libs, and tried to make our story relevant to today.
Featuring Jon Stockdale, Dwight Chiles, Erin McCarson, Jason Phillips, Paula O’Brien, Elijah York, Elli Murray, Rachel McCrain, Olivia Stuller, Zak Hamrick, Selah Hamilton, Eli Hamilton, Ronnie Nielsen, Katie Alexander, Nora Tramm, and Elizabeth DeVault
Directed by Melon Wedick; assistant directed by Christine Hellman; stage management by Sarah Hajkowski; fight choreography by Jered Shults; intimacy choreography by Christine Hellman; lighting design by Abby Auman; costume design by Kayren McKnight; technical coordination by Sylvia Pierce
