Sam Gold has directed five Shakespeare tragedies, but his latest, “Romeo + Juliet,” is something different—a loud, clubby production designed to attract audiences the age of its protagonists. “It’s as if the teens from ‘Euphoria’ decided that they had to do Shakespeare,” Vinson Cunningham said, “and this is what they came up with.” The production stars Rachel Zegler, who starred in Steven Spielberg’s remake of “West Side Story,” and Kit Connor, of the Gen Z Netflix hit “Heartstopper,” and features music by Jack Antonoff. Gold, who cut his teeth doing experimental theatre with the venerable downtown company the Wooster Group, bristles at the view that his production is unfaithful to the original. “A lot of people falsely sort of label me as a deconstructionist or something, because they’re wearing street clothes,” he tells Cunningham. “I’m not deconstructing these plays. I’m doing the play. . . . I think it’s a gross misunderstanding of the difference between conventions and authentic engagement in a text.” Gold aspires to excite kids to get off their phones. “We are in a mental-health crisis [of] teen suicide. I’m doing a play about teen suicide, and all those young people are coming. And I think we can help them.”
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Vincent Cunningham, a staff writer for The New Yorker. There have been... At least 37 different productions of Romeo and Juliet on Broadway, not to mention countless high school productions. Maybe you were in one. I don't know. But this new one by the director Sam Gold is kind of a dark, clubby, Gen Z Romeo and Juliet.
It's as if the teens from Euphoria decided that they had to do Shakespeare, and this is what they came up with. The two stars are Rachel Ziegler, who you probably know from the latest movie version of West Side Story, and Kit Conner, who's from the teen Netflix hit Heartstopper.
I wanted to talk to Sam Gold partly just because I really admire his work, but also because I always have this question when someone does Romeo and Juliet, and the question is, why now? Gold has famously directed five of Shakespeare's great tragedies, and it seems that he's kind of working through something about Shakespeare in public in front of all of us.
So I wanted to understand why Romeo and Juliet, why now, and how he came up with this totally interesting, totally bonkers production. How does Sam Gold find his way into the middle of this mess? Like, what makes you decide to do Romeo and Juliet now?
I want to think that in this moment, after the pandemic, and after people have had enough years, like, completely addicted to their phones, that young people are starting to really crave theater. I just was filled with... the desire to make something for young people. And I could see, you know, it was the spring and I was seeing November 5th coming, you know, we have this election.
What if I tried to open a play around the election that was gonna sort of put a fire under young people about what's really, really hard about life right now? Yeah. And I immediately thought of Romeo and Juliet, you know, two households both alike in dignity. That's the first two lines of the play. It's like we're more the same than we are different.
And theater becomes this place where we can come together. Even if you feel really differently than the person sitting next to you about who you're going to vote for, you breathe that same air. And Romeo and Juliet's a play where... Shakespeare is sacrificing these two kids with the idea that maybe the adults would wake up a bit to the ways they're hurting each other unnecessarily.
That's the thesis of that play.
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