"So, Romeo wanted to, like, bang Juliet"

Instead of just another tired-ass production of Romeo and Juliet, the Nature Theater of Oklahoma put a wicked spin on it. They randomly phoned people and asked them to recall the plot. The play is a series of verbatim monologues based on those phone calls. The results are hysterical.

Two masterful actors deliver the monologues in Elizabethan English and period costumes. Some of the respondents were surprisingly knowledgeable about the play but most delivered the same vague, uninformed story that I, myself, would have given if they had phoned me.

The last quarter of the play is given over to a dialogue examining the annoying neediness of young lovers and, worse, the unquenchable hunger for attention by actors who embrace Shakespearean roles. At the very end of the play, after heaping all that onto a funeral pyre, the lights go down and the two actors stand center stage and deliver a bit of Romeo and Juliet just as Shakespeare intended it. The beauty of the language and difficulty of the delivery is suddenly revealed.