If you, too, were a high school theater kid, you know that the real tears, bloodshed and gut-wrenching drama doesn’t happen on the stage. With lines like, “You know what they say: Some parts are big, and some parts are small, but actors have to act them,” Boomerang Theatre Company’s premiere production of Mercutio Loves Romeo Loves Juliet Loves by Gina Femia is keenly, tenderly aware of the pain of high school theater and being a teenage girl.
Mercutio Loves Romeo Loves Juliet Loves, directed by Scott Ebersold, is “a new queer kinda adaptation of Romeo and Juliet,” according to Boomerang’s online program. Boomerang Theatre Company produces indie theater in New York City, and this month marks the first-ever production of Femia’s new play.
The play centers around characters Britt, Ellie and Amber—played by Stacey Raymond, Leah Nicole Raymond and Rocky Vega—three students at an all-girls’ Catholic high school in 2005. Britt and Ellie are theater-loving, cheerleader-hating BFFs with plaid uniforms and flip phones. Britt is gay, and Ellie … well, according to Britt, “Ellie is straight. If straight people had a mascot, it would be her.”
Britt and Ellie are excited to star opposite each other in this year’s school play, Romeo and Juliet, but they’re surprised—and disappointed—when cheerleader Amber gets cast as Juliet instead of Ellie, after an injury forces Amber to find a new after-school activity.
While rehearsals are underway, Britt (Romeo) and Ellie (begrudgingly cast as Mercutio) slowly become friends with Amber. Amber, who turns out to be bi, is more down-to-earth than Britt and Ellie’s past experiences with cheerleaders have led them to imagine.
At the same time, while Britt develops a crush on Amber, Amber starts wondering if Ellie is really straight, while Ellie struggles with her long-repressed feelings for Britt in a three-way love triangle that seems straight out of Twelfth Night, not Romeo and Juliet. But, as Ellie notices during Romeo and Juliet rehearsals, Mercutio seems to care about Romeo in a way that goes beyond a strictly platonic friendship between two guys.
With only three characters in the play, all three cast members were onstage for long chunks of time besides doing their own set and costume changes. But Vega and both Raymonds (who are married in real life) maintained energy and connection with each other and the audience for the full 90-minute show.
I appreciated the theme of female friendship, as Britt and Ellie become and stay friends with Amber, even as all three begin to fall in love with each other. At first, when Britt and Ellie talk about their mutual hatred of cheerleaders, I was worried that the play would fall into the trope of nice geeks versus blond, bitchy cheerleaders that ends up being sexist even while it tries to advocate for the underdogs in the unpopular crowd. However, Amber’s character makes Britt and Ellie reconsider their idea that all cheerleaders are equally shallow and mean.
Even though the rest of the cheerleaders remain an anonymous offstage threat, one of the highlights of the play for me was the friendship that Britt and Ellie develop with Amber, culminating at a sleepover together after the play gets canceled when Britt and Amber dance together in their costumes at the school Halloween dance (hoping that their dancing together will fly under the radar if they go as Romeo and Juliet). Instead of lingering very long on Ellie’s disappointment when Amber gets cast as Juliet instead of her, Mercutio Loves Romeo Loves Juliet Loves challenges the standard women-competing-against-women trope by showing the three friends chatting, listening to music and making decorations together while they rehearse after some short initial rivalry.
Director Scott Ebersold said the play explores themes of young people dealing with complicated questions about sexuality and gender, but “does so with joy,” and “while the play has moments that might break your heart, joy is never out of reach.”
Despite highlighting important issues about identity for LGBTQ+ teenagers, Mercutio Loves Romeo Loves Juliet Loves also doesn’t take itself too seriously, showing the silliness of high school theater and the shenanigans the characters get up to like writing innuendos on styrofoam gravestones for the Halloween dance.
Ebersold describes the play as “a love letter to theater kids everywhere—especially queer theater kids.” Besides the play’s attention to being queer in a Catholic school where things like two girls dancing together at a school dance are against the rules, I think the play also highlights what it’s like to be a young woman in after-school theater.
Amber’s line, “We can’t have a play without girls playing guys unless we did a play with all women characters … but do those even exist?” got quite a few telling laughs from the audience. School theater gives girls a place where they can be loud and take up space. (Amber says she loves cheer because she gets to scream, jump up high and fall, only to get back up again.)
At the same time, it’s so often true that a drama class full of girls is forced to compete for one or two women’s parts in a play with mostly male characters, while the small handful of (worse) guys who try out get the leads. Some girls like this opportunity to try out a new gender. Britt, who wears pants and a sweater for her school uniform while Ellie and Amber wear skirts, always wants to play men.
But in my own high school plays, I never wanted to be a guy. At the time, I wondered if not wanting to be a Lost Boy or a Newsie meant that I wasn’t a good, versatile actor. Now looking back, I think I was just frustrated that I had to play men because those were the parts available, even though most of us trying out for the play identified as women.
In the play, Britt, Ellie and Amber all use school theater as a way of getting outside their usual roles as Catholic schoolgirls and trying out new characters instead. Even though moments in the play mirror the tragedy in Shakespeare’s original of people not being allowed to love each other, Mercutio Loves Romeo Loves Juliet Loves shows the fun geekiness of high school theater and the highs and lows of being a teenage girl that even non-theater kids will relate to.
Mercutio Loves Romeo Loves Juliet Loves is running at The Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre at ART/New York until Nov. 24, 2024.
