Vinson Cunningham: This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Vinson 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 Connor, who's from the teen Netflix hit Heart Stopper. 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 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? What makes you decide to do Romeo and Juliet now?

Sam Gold: I want to think that in this moment, after the pandemic and after people have had enough years 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, it was the spring and I was seeing November 5th coming.

We have this election. What if I tried to open a play around the election that was going to put a fire under young people about what's really, really hard about life right now and I immediately thought of Romeo and Juliet. 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 gonna 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 like the thesis of that play.

Vinson Cunningham: It's funny that you framed the play in that way. I've always thought of Romeo and Juliet as a play about young people, but not necessarily as one for young people. There were so many, especially young women in the crowd that I went to. There was certainly like a fan aspect of like, we know these people, we're excited for them.

One subtext of the play was, is Kit Connor's triceps are very prominently displayed all play long but it just seemed to have this very populist feeling where the people in the audience are being interacted with, are offering their emotions, their sighs, their exclamations. What was your theory of audience in making this show?

Sam Gold: I was like, what if we make a show where that generation of audience member feels spoken to, feels like this is for me, feels like I can come to this, I feel oriented. And then what you give them is Shakespeare. They want to be there and they want to take in this ritual that really reflects something deep about our society and they do. 18 to 25 is our audience and they are laughing at 400-year-old jokes.

They are hearing the wit, the poetry, the rhymes, the scansion, the sonnets and they are responding to the language. They're not laughing at Kit's triceps, they're laughing at Shakespeare. They're really hearing the play. That was the goal. It was never to be--

Vinson Cunningham: I did not mean to denigrate Kit's triceps. [laughs]

Sam Gold: It's not to be cynical. I wanted the world on stage to reflect the world that that generation of audience member experiences in life, which is what Shakespeare did. Shakespeare was a populist and Shakespeare was putting plays on to communicate very directly with his popular audience. The jokes were of the moment.

There's a song referenced in Romeo and Juliet, the nurse's servant Peter, after everybody thinks Juliet's dead, says to the musicians because there are always live musicians in a Shakespeare play and they break the fourth wall and Peter says to the musician that is underscoring the Shakespeare play, will you play Heart's Ease? Because my heart is full and we need a silly dump to comfort us.

I use a pop song from this generation's vocabulary because that's what Shakespeare was doing. He was taking a song everybody knew and making a joke, using it to lighten the mood on stage and that's what I'm doing. It's not cynical. It's genuinely trying to do for a young audience now, what I firmly believe is what Shakespeare was trying to do with his audience.

[music : Rachel Zegler - Man of the House]

Vinson Cunningham: You Sam, you've directed all five of Shakespeare's tragedies. Othello, MacBeth, King Lear, Hamlet, and now Romeo and Juliet. Has this been a project for you? Because you've also done-- you've worked on Ibsen, you've worked on other things, but has this Shakespeare visitation for you, do you conceive of it as one project?

Sam Gold: Yes. My mentor coming up was the director, Elizabeth Lecompte and the way Liz would work is--

Vinson Cunningham: From the Worcester Group.

Sam Gold: Yes, sorry. The Worcester Group. What she does is when she gets to the end of a project, she starts the next project from there. The set from one project becomes the raw materials to start making the next one. They're all flowing one to the next. On these Shakespeares, it really goes back to a feeling I had when I was in school.

I went to grad school at Juilliard and there were these really young companies of actors, and they lived and breathed-- 24 hours a day, they were together. They knew each other so well. They were all having sex with each other and breaking up and getting drunk at night in their dorm rooms and then getting up at seven in the morning to do fitness class.

They were just so in it with each other. That is ensemble and when I was at school, I just loved making these plays with these young ensembles. I've been trying to do that with these Shakespeares, to bring these ensembles together and all five of them come from that same place. They all were, I don't know, almost like rough and ready school plays.

Vinson Cunningham: Does the makeup of that ensemble, who's in it, what ideas and physicality and everything that they bring, is that something that develops in conjunction with that ensemble, or do you, as a director, show up with a concept? I want to try this thing. Let's see how this works. How does the idea develop? The thing that makes, I don't know, your MacBeth different than other MacBeths?

Sam Gold: I'm really inspired by specific actors. Gabby Beans came in to audition and all of a sudden it's like Mercutio and the Friar. What if Gabby is Shakespeare, the storyteller, holding it down for us? The MC. That idea of Gabby as the MC of the evening, that's just Gabby. That's me responding to her talent.

Vinson Cunningham: We talked already about notions of what is the popular or what is the broad. You mentioned earlier, the Worcester Group, which is this downtown New York, experimental, avant-garde theater company. Another, I don't want to say benefit that they have, but a particularity is the idea of a small audience that's coming for something that is self-consciously an experiment.

And you working out on Broadway, which is a very different notion of what it means to be a director, a very different notion of audience, very different prerogatives. How does it feel to do all the things that you're talking about on Broadway which is the broadest audience possible?

Sam Gold: A lot of people falsely label me as a deconstructionist or something because they're wearing street clothes.

Vinson Cunningham: Does that piss you off when people do it?

Sam Gold: It does piss me off because-- well, it doesn't piss me off, but it's sad that they don't really know what they're saying when they're attributing that to me. I'm not deconstructing these plays. I'm doing the play. I've done plays where I think Ben Brantley said the playwright was rolling in his grave, which it's not the most original piece of criticism. I think it's a gross misunderstanding of the difference between conventions and authentic engagement in a text.

Vinson Cunningham: Right. Just because they're not wearing the frills or whatever does not mean that you have therefore desecrated the play.

Sam Gold: Yes, we have conventions. When you're going to go see an Ibsen play, this is what you picture it looking like. Those expectations come from some other successful period of theater history. Richard Eyre does enough beautiful Ibsen plays at the Royal National Theater in the '90s.

Then we think of Ibsen as-- when we close our eyes, we see some Richard Eyre production, but it's 40 years later, 30 years later, and that's a convention.

Vinson Cunningham: It's not like that production was born in the mind of Ibsen. This is about--

Sam Gold: Exactly. It has nothing to do with it. And I'm actually just reading the play and engaging in the play, and I'm doing a ton of homework on what Elizabethan theater was like, what Elizabethan culture was like what Elizabethan politics were like. I'm understanding what's going on in religious battles and political battles of the time, and then I'm thinking about what the playwright was trying to do vis a vis all those things and thinking about our own world and how that play could best affect the audience that doesn't have those politics from 400 years ago, has a different set of politics.

With Romeo and Juliet, there will be people that think I have the sound too loud.

Vinson Cunningham: [laughs] The sound is loud. It's fun.

Sam Gold: It's loud in there. And there will be audience members that say that is too loud. That's fine with me because I have an interest in connecting this text to this specific audience that does not think it's too loud and I'm willing to hear the complaints because I have a risk tolerance that I think has come from starting downtown.

Vinson Cunningham: That's the director Sam Gold talking about the new Broadway production of Romeo and Juliet. We'll be right back in a moment. I'm Vinson Cunningham, a staff writer here at the New Yorker and I've been talking with the director Sam Gold about this latest new production of Romeo and Juliet. We'll continue our conversation now.

Does staging something in the round change your whole conception visually as a director? What is the-- I've always wondered.

Sam Gold: The reason why I really love it is the proscenium theaters, the Broadway theaters, they were built in the 19th century with the idea that there was going to be an actor standing downstage center declaiming. I'm happy to see Ethel Merman stand down center-- if I could be taken back in time, I would enjoy going to those shows.

It's not that I dislike it, it's that it's an old convention and because of technological advances, it doesn't really make sense for every play to be done that way. A proscenium doesn't really speak to how a contemporary audience will best engage with storytelling live. And the round is much closer. You get this sort of over-the-shoulder shot that you're used to in a film and you get intimacy that film has given us to actors.

After the close-up, it's hard to sit at the back of a 1,000-seat, 2,000-seat theater. At Circle in the Square, everybody's in a close-up. There are zero bad seats at Circle in the Square. And so you get that experience beause I'm trying to do these plays that I'm saying they're grief rituals. We're trying to depict a trauma so that the audience can process their own trauma.

That's the basic idea. I think they work a lot better when you can have intimacy, when you can feel close to the actors, when you can feel them breathe. To me, the smaller the theater, the closer you can be to the actors, the more I'm able to do my job.

Vinson Cunningham: People are increasingly engrossed in screens. Obviously, film precedes all the problems we think about with smartphones and everything, but what is the primary relationship between what you do and what shows up on screens in terms of TV and film?

Sam Gold: Mostly what I'm doing is I'm trying to tell a story live with people and use every tool I can to make it as powerful as possible. Film is now deeply embedded in our psyche but there were all sorts of other kinds of popular entertainments, culture, storytelling that he's engaging with. I'm just doing what I feel like Shakespeare's doing. Wit, this idea in Elizabethan England, it's like a game, a sport, a thing to do after school.

How are we to understand that when Romeo and Mercutio and Benvolio, wit as a verb, how do we field the after-school activity of it the way Shakespeare's society did? I'm trying to pull from a toolbox and one is film. I kept referencing Quentin Tarantino during the Romeo and Juliet rehearsals because-

Vinson Cunningham: Really?

Sam Gold: -that's a populist adventurous artist. There's something about the way Shakespeare that reminds me a little bit about the way Quentin Tarantino works. They have some things in common about willingness to go from something serious to something funny and back quickly. You say like, oh, how am I going to do this? How am I going to go from this super sad moment to this funny moment?

You think, people aren't going to be able to do that. They won't be able to ride that wave. We don't do that anymore. But then I think, no, we do. Like in a Tarantino movie we do. So I use film that way.

Vinson Cunningham: One thing that Shakespeare has in common with-- this is not something that I was ever primed to think about. That Shakespeare has in common with Quentin Tarantino is that they are both adept at using the stories of their time. This is a long way of asking what it was like working with Jeremy Strong, who appears in one of the great stories of our time, Succession, when you worked with him on Enemy of the People.

You work with somebody that comes from a world of reference. This is the guy who played Kendall Roy. Is that something that I'm using with this person? Is it something that I'm trying to strip away?

Sam Gold: I think I've maybe overemphasized that what we are making will stand alone and people will just enter, they'll suspend their disbelief and they will stop seeing Kendall Roy the second Jeremy enters and they will start seeing Thomas Stockman. I don't know that that's always been successful because you can't rip that away from people.

Listen, theater is too obsessed with celebrity, but it's also saving the theater from financial ruin to be so obsessed with celebrity. Listen, Jeremy Strong was a brilliant actor 20 years before he was in Succession. He and I have done multiple plays together. We grew up together. We've been friends since college.

I don't think of him as Kendall Roy from Succession at all. That's very low on my list of references in my mind to the work of Jeremy Strong. Maybe I underestimated that most people's relationship to Jeremy is much different than mine and I didn't really think about Kendall Roy and maybe I should have.

Vinson Cunningham: I was thinking about this as I watched, again, in an amazing way, those young people who are at Romeo and Juliet at the end, just swarming the exits waiting to receive Rachel and Kit. What came into my mind is, whether there is any difference, whether there needs to be any difference between the function of the audience as we classically understand it in theater and the new word that we have, which is fandom, and whether that at all is something that is in the fringes of your consciousness as you make your work.

Sam Gold: I don't think it's new at all.

Vinson Cunningham: True, yes, we have made this term.

Sam Gold: When Richard Burton was playing Hamlet and Elizabeth Taylor would sit in the balcony to watch, everyone would line up around the fucking block to try to see Liz Taylor. They weren't coming for Richard Burton's Hamlet, they were coming to see Elizabeth Taylor. That's always been the case and I think it was the case in Shakespeare's time.

There's nothing I'm enjoying more right now than the fact that there's 19-year-old audience members hearing and understanding the poetry of Shakespeare and then being so excited at the end that they want to stand for an hour to meet the person that delivered that language. I do think that's part of it. Part of it is that they love Heartstopper, part of it is that they're addicted to their phones, but part of it is that the play lit them up.

I don't think it's a bad thing for the theater that these young people are-- I mean, our stage door is crazy.

Vinson Cunningham: I saw it, dude.

Sam Gold: And I don't think that's a bad thing.

Vinson Cunningham: No, it seemed like a sign of health.

Sam Gold: Yes, if those people come see another play-- People need theater. We know we need to get in a room and tell stories. It is not good-- no one thinks-- the Surgeon General is telling you it is not good to be at home looking at social media all the time. We are in a mental health crisis, teen suicide. I'm doing a play about teen suicide and all those young people are coming and I think we can help them. That can be good.

Vinson Cunningham: Well, Sam, thank you so much for these interpretations, this work, and for talking to us. This is great.

Sam Gold: Thank you so much.

Vinson Cunningham: That's the director, Sam Gold, talking about the latest revival of Romeo and Juliet, which is now playing on Broadway at the Circle in the Square Theater. And that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. I'm Vinson Cunningham, a staff writer at the New Yorker and by the way, I'm also one of the co-hosts of the New Yorker's weekly culture podcast, Critics at Large. New episodes drop every Thursday.

David Remnick will be back on Friday. Thanks for listening.

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