When she was preparing to stage Romeo and Juliet at Canada’s Stratford festival, director Sam White took a research trip to fair Verona. “And I was sort of not impressed,” she says with a laugh, remembering her visit to the Casa di Giulietta with its 20th-century balcony, which has become a popular attraction for romantic tourists. “I thought, the balcony at the Festival theatre is much better than this tiny thing!”
Stratford’s main stage, with its pioneering thrust design, has a formidable balcony that White makes the heart of her tragedy. “I wanted it to be special for Juliet,” she says. “This is the place where I’ve imagined, since she was a little girl, she has always gone for solace and to dream and talk to God.” It is also where the couple, played by Jonathan Mason and Vanessa Sears, consummate their relationship in a sweetly tender moment framed by billowing white curtains. White drew upon two inspirations for the scene: Janet Jackson striding through red drapes to the stage in her music video for If and an Issey Miyake exhibition with “billowing bits of fabric that I thought were really gorgeous”.
White rehearsed the choreography for the intimate encounter at home on her own: “in the mirror, figuring out what some of the shapes looked like. Then, thank goodness, we had a brilliant intimacy choreographer, Anita Nittoly, who made it pretty. Because mine wasn’t pretty. She made a really beautiful honeymoon moment, I call it, for Romeo and Juliet.”
The way White talks about many of the play’s characters makes it clear how much she cares about them; her empathy as a director is key to the production’s power. Take Glynis Ranney’s performance as the Nurse, a character who traditionally provides some colourful comedy and sentiment before making her final exit with a flurry of woeful wailing. White, in contrast, gives Ranney a Purcell aria, Dido’s Lament, to sing – emphasising the impact of this third major death in her life. “She’s lost Susan, her daughter, as she tells us. She also lost her husband. So I think that aria captures the essence of what the rest of the Nurse’s life looks like.”
Juliet, too, is gifted an aria, Vissi d’Arte from Tosca, performed at the ball where Romeo first sees her. “If you want to make somebody fall in love really quickly, use Puccini,” White says. “When you see her standing there on this beautiful podium singing, all of us fall in love with her instantly. There’s no doubt about how Romeo could become so enamoured and deeply in love with this incredible being, because she’s sort of like the voice of an angel.” Sears even appears in angelic garb at the top of the play to sing the prologue. “‘Two households, both alike in dignity’ always felt like a song to me,” White says. “As someone who really loved rap music when I was a kid, couplets always stuck with me. That’s how I was able to memorise the prologue so early on.”
It was Salt-N-Pepa who indirectly introduced White to Shakespeare when she was eight. “My mother was very adamant about my brother and I not listening to rap music,” she says. But one day, “she heard me listening to Push It. I don’t really know how because the boombox was pressed against my ears. But moms have bat ears! She knocked on my door, but it wasn’t like a cute little knock, it was, you know, the mama knock. And she gave me the complete works of William Shakespeare.” She turned to Romeo and Juliet because “I knew they had strict parents and they were young, so I could relate to that”.
The Stratford production, which emphasises the ferocity of Renaissance-era Verona, draws upon White’s time at school in her home town of Detroit. “I would always tell the actors, it’s not Stratford. You can’t look outside and see swans gleefully walking across the street. It’s Verona, a violent place.” Tybalt is slain by a blade “but that never sat well with me” she explains, as he is renowned as such a great swordsman. “Unfortunately, I have a lot of references for violence, specifically in school. I had seen a fight where someone’s necklace had been taken and sort of used as a weapon against them and they were choked from behind. The person didn’t die because eventually a teacher came in … It changed my perception of the school, my teachers, the person who was choked and the person who did the choking. So I wanted to have something that would change the dynamic of the play. Until Tybalt dies, it’s almost a comedy; when we come back from the interval, it becomes a tragedy.”
The Stratford production is White’s fifth time directing the play. Romeo and Juliet was presented in the first season of work staged by her company Shakespeare in Detroit, which she launched in 2013. She had considered a career in journalism and was working as a standup comedian in Las Vegas when she made a revelatory trip to the Utah Shakespeare festival in Cedar City. “I thought, if they can do this … I could probably start a Shakespeare company in Detroit.”
Stratford’s Romeo and Juliet flies by, without major cuts to the text. White perhaps mastered pacing from her days as a standup. “I could tell 10 jokes a minute,” she says, “Boom, boom, boom.” One of her mentors in comedy told her she was moving around the stage too much and counselled her to “bring the audience to you” – words she remembers when directing.
For Shakespeare in Detroit, that extends to bringing the audience to unusual locations around the city for site-specific productions. In the summer of 2013, weeks after the City of Detroit filed for bankruptcy, she launched the company with an outdoor, free Othello done on a $3,000 budget in Grand Circus Park downtown. “And 500 people came out for that play. I knew my mother would come. But I didn’t know if anybody else would show up.” She calls the one-off performance “the most glorious day of my artistic career”.
Its follow-up, Antony and Cleopatra, was put on at a former Lincoln Motor Company building, with repurposed props and costumes. “We have a great time finding spaces and then the play that speaks to that space. And people who have never been to the theatre before, and wouldn’t dare ever step into a theatre, come to see these shows because they feel like they’re connected to whatever the architecture might be.”
White, who is about to direct Henry VIII for San Diego’s Old Globe theatre, has written a TV pilot inspired by creating a Shakespeare company “from the ground up”. She describes it as a cross between Slings & Arrows, the series set at a Shakespearean festival not unlike Stratford, and the comedy Insecure, starring and co-created by Issa Rae. She draws a comparison to Sex and the City, too. “But Mr Big is the city. It’s not some guy, you know. The city has put me through some things, good and bad … It’s really a love story for anybody who’s ever been passionate about a person, a place or a thing, or any entrepreneur, anybody who’s had a dream.”
She will workshop the show in Detroit, where her company’s contribution to the city goes beyond performance and includes a schools initiative called Steam, which uses theatre to help teach other subjects such as “the science of lighting and the technology of sound design,” she explains. “Engineering for us is costume-making and there is the mathematics of set-building.” So far they have worked with 3,000 students. “Some kids don’t want to be actors,” she says. “But they do want to know how you light a play or mix the sound for a play.” Or how to build a balcony with billowing curtains for a pair of star-crossed lovers.
Romeo and Juliet is at the Stratford festival, Ontario, until 26 October.
