Putting the "Community" into Community Theater

This blog post is dedicated to the tasteless drips who sat behind me and complained during the first half of the local production of Brews with the Bard: Romeo & Juliet Get Trashed. Despite the show’s advertising, from your (not at all hushed) comments it seems you were expecting a conventional interpretation of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy. Thank you for leaving during intermission so the rest of us could soak up the joy of performance undisturbed.

At any given moment, there are roughly one billion productions of William Shakespeare’s classic plays being performed around the world. In August of this year, it was our turn when Blank Conversations Theater Company put on two nights of Romeo and Juliet at the Rio Grande Theater. Instead of a traditional adaptation, featuring 15th century costumes and lilting English accents, this production was part of the Brews with the Bard series. To prepare, the actors had to memorize their lines, choreograph their blockings, and then make everything trickier by getting hammered over the course of the evening. Audiences were encouraged to participate, both by imbibing and by interacting with the performing actors. As a result, no two showings would be exactly alike.

Although Romeo and Juliet is classified as a tragedy, the night’s audience knew from the jump that this would be a silly time. While the cast got ready backstage, the director invited audience members to play improv games onstage. (The prizes, of course, were drink tickets.) When curtains went up, the characters took the stage in costumes anachronistic to the dialogue: Romeo appeared in a cutout tank and backwards ball cap; the friars wore Hawaiian shirts to distinguish themselves; Juliet’s nurse snapped and waved a fan that bore the visage of Latrice Royale. The play began with the actors sticking to the original dialogue; this was still a Shakespeare play, and they had done the work to get in character. As the show progressed and blood alcohol levels rose, characters sprinkled more and more improv into their lines (if you’re an Early Modern English enthusiast, this might have been a nightmare). Some changes are surely planned; Benvolio had a running gag of forgetting which show he belonged in and would occasionally break out into song from a different show. The actor playing the Prince spotted his mother in the front row and shot her with his Nerf gun. The epic battle between the Montagues and the Capulets was fought with lightsabers and foam Minecraft swords. I’m pretty sure 90% of the costumes and props are just stuff the cast owned, which is one way to run a show on a budget. It ruled.

(Image borrowed from BCTC's instagram, @blankconversations)

I’ve been lucky enough to see professional shows and musicals with packed theaters and breathtaking stage productions. I’ve also been lucky enough to spend a delightful evening at a backdoor production of The Wyrd Sisters, with an audience of a dozen and the Playbill printed on a single sheet of computer paper. The collective effervescence of a show, the arc of lightning between cast and audience, are part of what makes theater the unique art form that it is. Blank Conversations seems to get it, and they want to bring it to anyone who wants it. From their website, BCTC’s production philosophy is “[m]aking art happen. All people are capable of making art happen, but they need the right place to do it. The door of opportunity can’t be opened if the door isn’t there anyway. Dare to fail, learn to try.” The art of telling stories and playing pretend shouldn’t be an exclusive one.

With that in mind, I’ll be attending their shadowcast production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show this weekend with gusto. The Rio Grande will once again play host to our tomfoolery, with two shows at 8pm on October 13th and 14th. I hear we’re supposed to throw toast at the stage!