First, I have to admit, I love me some circus theatre, like Duel Reality at Seattle Rep, that wonderful hybrid of a play with the circus arts. Admittedly, too often the theatrical can overwhelm the theatre and the circus arts can take over the dramatic elements. Sometimes it seems a real problem of balance.
Not this time. Not at all.
The audience came totally prepared for the opening night of the 7 Fingers world première of Duel Reality, Shana Carroll’s brilliant reworking and rethinking of Romeo and Juliet. Here, the conceit is extended through that early modern tragedy to the pathos of West Side Story, to the joy of Duel Reality. The conceit is simple: what would happen if we redid Romeo and Juliet as a contest between two gangs of kids, here Red and Blue, a distinction that is both all important and entirely arbitrary, reflecting exactly the plain silliness of the long feud between the Montagues and the Capulets.
A nice touch is giving red and blue armbands to the audience purely based on their location in the seats and encouraging tribal identity. Reds vs. Blues turns out to be oddly effective and powerful as Duel Reality, pun intended, starts off with a fight only because of the colour of both the bands and of the costumes.
There's no reason for that old feud between the Capulets and the Montagues in Verona to go on, none whatsoever, and yet it does. Here, the circus arts are the means of battle and of sex. Romeo and Juliet (so I guessed, but the programme just lists all performers in alphabetical order) don't just share a sonnet at a costume ball: they use their bodies. They dance but in the kind of high-risk, three-dimensional space acrobatics can create in a physical theatre. Usually, the circus arts inhabit a world in which danger is lurking just behind the scenes, the fear or even desire that we might be present at the very real death or at least injury of a performer if something goes wrong and someone misses a catch.
Here, the danger of circus acts is ever-present and made explicit, especially as when one performer and Juliet slide down two poles at literally breakneck speeds, and Juliet ends with her nose inches from the floor. She thus beats the other performer, as measured by the Duke of this version, the Referee, per his tape measure. (Believe me, there are worse ways to get audiences to understand what is happening in Verona than a game, though the Referee seems to have power to do something about Verona’s violence that Escalus, Prince of Verona in the original, clearly lacks.)
The sword fight between Tybalt, the Prince of Cats, and Mercutio here is translated into the seemingly innocuous game of teeter-totter (seesaw), as the two performers use the board to leap and twist and somersault and sail higher and higher. It's not till Tybalt waits till Mercutio is high, so high, in the air and steps aside, off of the teeter-totter, so that Mercutio falls, seemingly to his death. It was a deliberately cruel moment which caused the audience to gasp and be still, really for the first time. Because the audience had come basically ready to party, it took this moment to bring us all to quiet.
A dark moment, it is soon replaced with what the Renaissance would have known as “sprezzatura”, the ability to play with language or other formal arts and show off with them, just as 7 Fingers do with their bodies. From the peak of Mercutio's execution, we see a playful, magical world again, one in which wonder prevails. How many rings, or plastic bowling pins, or balls can one keep in the air? And how many times can one catch one's partner on the very edge of missing?
But all’s well that ends well, finally. The show concludes with Mercutio hugging a reconciled Tybalt and Romeo and Juliet living to love each other. And it is joy all around for the audience. Well done, Seattle Rep, for bringing back 7 Fingers in this new show. As one of the performers said, we need “blooming” these days, not the original text’s “glooming”. And that is exactly what happened on the Seattle Rep's stage tonight, with a full and complete joy.
Don’t waste any time. Get your tickets ASAP. They’re going fast, as well they should.