"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts..."

Such famous words perfectly encapsulate the theme of R&J, Joe Calarco's fresh vision of the Shakespearean classic performed at HF on August 21, 22, and 23. Set in a strict, oppressive private school, R&J follows a group of four friends who struggle against the regimented daytime of math, Latin, religion and uniform by taking to the night and acting out Romeo and Juliet on a makeshift stage with such remarkably ingenuous fervor that you almost want to jump right in and join them in their playing. Such honest zeal, however, soon gives way to two hours of symbolism and social commentary-laden stage traffic.

Calarco's original features four boys playing the main roles, some playing many, while HF's interpretation features eight actors to perform the four roles: four boys (Nick Narcisi, Teddy Hughes, Marlon Hulett, Grant Rios) and four girls (Olivia Cordero, Hillary Sigale, Rachel Newman, Ashley Raffauf), each gender occupying a side of the stage and each mimicking, complimenting, and paralleling the other's words and actions without ever directly interacting with the opposite sex. At the same time as the choice of cast pays homage to the same-sex casts of the stage in Shakespeare's time, it also puts a new spin on the struggles inherent in Romeo and Juliet as well as strengthening the performance's symmetrically aesthetic appeal.

The setting of the school is rather sparse, with the characters' only moveable props on either side being a table, four chairs, and a bookcase; from this bookcase a large red book attached to a lengthy bolt of bright red cloth is withdrawn, visually bringing Romeo and Juliet to life -- the two cloths were the bright red veins coursing through the entire production, the most versatile and metamorphic prop I've ever seen -- throughout the performance becoming more literal depictions of vials of poison, daggers, and rapiers, character identifiers like the nurses' hoods and the Lady Capulets' skirts, and figurative manifestations of concepts like authority, death, and repression.

As the characters become more engrossed in performing Romeo and Juliet, the audience becomes less aware of where the line is being drawn between acting and living. When Female Student #1 (Cordero) speaks the line, "My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself/ Because it is an enemy to thee", is she merely playing Romeo or subtly suggesting to her Juliet that outside of the context of their acting, her name or gender is her love's enemy? The whimsical world of the play and the school world of moral codes often intertwine when the actors get too caught up and their peers break character to remind them, "thou shalt not." During Romeo (Narcisi, Cordero) and Juliet (Hughes, Sigale)'s wedding, the two students playing the Friar (Hulett, Newman) snatch the books away and, reprimanding the lovers, refuse to continue with the scene as it is tiptoeing the line and challenging the values of their religion and school. In these moments, the students resume upholding the strictness of the school and recite from a book of etiquette and prescribed gender roles to combat the strong homosexual overtones of their peers' liberating performance.

The haunting, yet quirky background music was put together by Mikey Moran, and provided an entirely new level of storytelling that could not be achieved by dialogue alone. Although during certain scenes (Romeo taking the poison) the quirkiness overwhelmed the natural flow of the music, throughout the majority of the play it gave one a sense of another element of meaning behind every action performed, creating a sense of hidden connotation in every step and breath taken on stage.

The actors put on stunning performances, and the occasional flub of a line or loss of synchronicity was always made up for by the shear earnestness and heartfeltness of the actors as a whole. This was the inaugural performance of HF's L.i.T.E. (Leaders in Theatre Ensemble) group, and was produced entirely by upperclassmen at HF. Overall, R&J is quirky, fun, engrossing, and shows definitively that love knows no time, gender, or name.