The tragedy of performative reconciliation: reinterpreting Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to reclaim reality in a culture governed by spectacle and control

This thesis documents my process of reinterpreting Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for the University of Iowa’s Mainstage 2025–2026 season. It traces my initial attraction to the play, research on the playwright and text, analysis of world, character, and plot, reflections on collaboration with designers, directing impulses, a record of the rehearsal process, and postproduction analysis. The project represents my most ambitious undertaking to date, involving the largest budget, team of collaborators, and artistic risks I have yet pursued.

At its core, this work captures my ongoing search for theatrical material of the highest caliber, material that can be playfully pillaged, radically reshaped, and made urgently alive. This production pushed beyond convention, condensing the text, shifting archetypes, and using music, design, and time as dramaturgical forces to make an old play feel startlingly relevant. Theatre here becomes a weapon: a ritual purging of empty, performative gestures that have replaced lived experience, exposing the systems of violence, judgment, and control that frame vulnerability and human connection as weakness.

It is, ultimately, a manipulation of the symbol “Shakespeare,” that has come to stand for theatre itself. Here, that symbol is aimed back at the system that invented it, idolizes it, institutionalizes it, and uses it to maintain power. There is as much to read between these lines as within them; I invite the reader to make connections, fill in gaps, and bring their own awareness to this work, which reflects an artist learning to define and protect artistic intent while working within, and against, structures of power.