Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation I ROMEO AND JULIET Fireside Chat

Daniel: Thank you, Monique. Thank you all for being here. This is super fun. Thank you to the Arden for their partnership. Thanks for Jonathan. Thanks to Jonathan for agreeing to chat with me for a few minutes. We’re going to talk about Romeo and Juliet. We’re going to talk about Shakespeare. This is so exciting for me. Occasionally I get to put on my Shakespeare cap. It never really comes off, but , it gets to be displayed a little more prominently tonight. So, in thinking about Romeo and Juliet, the question I wanted to to pose to you, Jonathan, to kick things off is, why now? What makes this the right moment for the Arden to stage this play?

What feels especially urgent or alive about Romeo and Juliet in this present moment in 2026?

Jonathan: First of all, I’m very intimidated right now by the love and passion for reading and theater and arts in this room. And I’m thrilled to be having this conversation. I think to to answer the the big question of why now, I have two answers for that. One is we want to authentically engage with artists in Philadelphia. And part of that is a continuing conversation that we have with the artists that make their living in Philadelphia.

We wanted to continue our working relationship with Amina Robinson. And if you’ve been here in the past, you might have seen Amina’s work when she directed 74 Seconds to Judgment. She directed Once on This Island. She directed Intimate Apparel last year. It is a continuing relationship that we have with somebody to lead a production. And when we said we want to do Shakespeare next year, what might you be interested in? And she immediately said , “I really want to work on a Romeo and Juliet.”

She said I was an actor previously and my first professional job was playing Juliet in New York. And so this was her opportunity to both revisit and to reimagine this story. The bigger the big capital W why now? I don’t think at the Arden we’re trying to answer that question for our audiences. We want to present the work and have you and the folks that walk through our doors answer that question.

And I think if if I’m going to speak for my for myself, I think that there are themes and characters in this play that make decisions by their gut and their judgment without thinking. And I think we can all reflect on perhaps in a on a global level what that’s like and what we experience on a personal level and what we see happening in the world. And so I think that that is answered throughout this play that is 430 years old! It’s amazing.

Daniel: Well, I think that’s such an interesting point, right? If the play itself is 430 years old, its playwright has been dead for 410 years, right? This is a guy who not just u has been gone a long time, but in hearing you talk about Philadelphia artists, right? And when I think of the Arden, that is something I think about showcasing the work of local artists. Showcasing local artists on stage as a native Philadelphian, this is one of our premier theatrical venues in this city. So why do we keep turning to this guy who never set foot in the United States? Right? Who’s been dead for over four centuries. What is it about him?

And let me tell you, I mean spoiler alert, I have a lot of answers to this question as well. Oh no. I have a lot of thoughts on this. I wrote a book about this, but I want to hear you, Jonathan, talk about why why Shakespeare?

Jonathan: The the universality, the universality, universality of of what he was writing about and the way in which he was poetically putting these thoughts and themes.

Both on the on the scribe but also having his actors perform is a remarkable feat of of creating a legacy. Between his sonnets and the plays and the histories and the dramas and the comedies, he was a this masterful commenter on the times.

And because, you know, in A Wrinkle in Time, which we just did as our our children’s production, you know, time is is a bit is, you know, this epic sort of cylindrical circle that keeps spiraling down and down and down. I think it’s because everything that he was writing about then matters right now. Everything and and the themes and the feelings that those individuals went through, we feel it today. We feel it today every day.

Yeah, agreed.

Daniel: And it’s such a rich canon, right? I mean, Shakespeare writes 38 plays that we know about. He probably wrote a few more beyond that. Some scholars will tell you it’s more like 40 or 41. We do know that 36 of his plays are printed seven years after his death in 1623 in a book that we call the First Folio. So my point in saying this is that there’s a lot of choice, right? If we want to get those Shakespearean themes that resonate with us, whether they be youthfulness or or violence or or anything any of the other million themes that we find in the Shakespearean canon.

So, thinking of you as a theater practitioner, as an associate artistic director here, how do you choose? How do you say, we’re going to do Romeo and Juliet this year instead of Midsummer or Much Ado or Othello or anything else?

Jonathan: To go back to the theme, the the the discussion of Philadelphia, right? Again, it was Amina who sort of guided us to say , ” I would love to do a Romeo and Juliet .” And so we we read it and we go , ” Can we do this with the artists in Philadelphia ?” When we’re working with designers, directors, actors, we always the the theme, the the the motto that we talk about is Philadelphia first. We always look at the actors and designers in Philadelphia who are making their living here first. And so on stage tonight, you’re going to see thirteen actors. Twelve of those live in Philadelphia. There’s only one out-of-town actor that we brought in from New York to be in this show. And every designer, the set designer, the lighting designer, the costume designer, the sound designer, all based here in Philadelphia. They’ve decided that this is where I want to make work, this is where I want to live. And so that we the big question is can we do this play with Philadelphia artists?

Terry and I, we talk about a lot and and with this production we felt we felt really excited about. Both to share with our main stage audiences and also we do we do a lot of work with teen with school groups. And so we have seven or eight 10: 30 AM performances of this production so that school groups can come and experience this play because it’s still part of the curriculum. They read it on the state and they read it on the page, but they they they get to actually actualize it and see it in front of them on the stage and and to experience the emotion and the depth that he was writing about before.

Daniel: I mean, I think that’s one of the things that makes us so excited about this partnership between the Arden Theatre and the Free Library and the Free Library Foundation, in this kind of mission alignment around youth, around youth literacy. We do something similar as Monique was saying with our Teen Author Series, bringing students from Philadelphia who get to meet the author, ask questions of the author, and also receive a free copy of the book in advance so that they can read it and go prepared into this discussion. So I think that’s a good kind of segue into a question about language.

You know, and I I want to think about how big a role language plays in Romeo and Juliet, whether you’re talking about the sparring wordplay at the beginning or the shared sonnet between the two title characters.

How does this factor Jonathan into the rehearsal process? How much do you attend to meter and form? And I’m so, you know, I watched this trailer for this production. I saw Mina talking about cutting this play and changing some things around. And it seems to me that the goal is accessibility. And and that is so important, right? Making it so that these productions are something that can be understood by all people.

Jonathan: I think it’s for the actors, I know it was very important for them to understand the pentameter of it all. For those of you that don’t know, right, Shakespeare mostly wrote in in a ten-beat, ten-syllable line. Some of them are are off and that’s he was giving cues to his actors about why is this important, what does this mean.

How does this matter? They all focused really hard on that aspect of the show. And then what what happens once we go get in front of an audience, we, you know, if I were directing, I’m not, I’m not Amina, but I know if I were directing, I’d always say crumple it up, throw it away, and trust. Now everything that you’ve learned, everything that we’ve rehearsed in the rehearsal room, now it’s about adding this 14th character of the audience and seeing how it breathes and lives organically and authentically in the room at the moment. And so it’s it’s both important and it’s also a little bit of it’s a thing that you can let go of.

Daniel: So I think we have time for maybe one more question. I’m going to press you on one more Shakespearean matter. So this play has such an incredibly long performance history, right? We don’t know exactly when it was first performed, but we do know that by the time it was printed for the first time in 1597, it had already been performed numerous times. This was a very popular play in the 1590s. So all the way from there down to the 21st century, not just on stage, but also film. Millennials like myself love to talk about the Baz Luhrmann Romeo and Juliet, which whenever I told someone I was coming to the Art Institute to see this production, Claire Danes seemed to come up in the conversation.

So, I guess what I’m wondering, Jonathan, with this play or with others by playwrights whose work is performed frequently, how much do you engage with that history or not when putting on a new production? The Ordnance itself put on a production of this play about what, fifteen, sixteen years ago. It was wonderful. I remember seeing it. How much do you deal with that and how much do you just cast it aside?

Jonathan: I auditioned for that production 16 years ago and I did not get cast, so that’s a really hot topic that you just brought up.

Daniel: I’m sorry for bringing it up.

Jonathan: I know. I think, I think it’s always about what do what does each individual bring to the room at that time. The production 16 years ago, we were we were all living it was we were living differently. And we’re 16 years older now, as individuals, as a city, as a country. It means something different than than it does today. And so I think it’s important to acknowledge, yes, that we had this great production of it 16 years ago. I saw that twice.

And now, this production lives in its own, 2026, mentality of this is where we are, as as a viewer, this is where they are as artists, and it’s a really exciting moment to get to share this with everybody. And I hope everybody sort of connects with something tonight. This you are their first audience. They have been rehearsing without an audience and so, like I said, the 14th character, you the audience they’ve been waiting for. And so this is a really great opportunity. They’re going to learn so much tonight, about how to alter because they rehearse again tomorrow, they rehearse starting at 12 noon tomorrow and they have rehearsal and then another performance tomorrow night. And that’s what we do through the preview process before opening, which is really exciting. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you for being here tonight and and thank you so much for engaging with with us and and your constituents. It’s really exciting. So thrilled.

Daniel: Let me just add my thanks. We’ll have to leave it there, but thank you again to the Arden for having us in partnership. This is wonderful. Thank you again to Jonathan for chatting with us. Thank you to all of you for coming. And I think all that’s left to say is enjoy the show.

Jonathan: We’ll see you inside.