“Romeo and Juliet” may be William Shakespeare’s best-known play which, like the young lovers’ passion and doom, is both a blessing and a curse for anyone producing the show.

Just ask Jacque Wheeler, who directs Valdosta State University Theatre and Dance’s “Romeo and Juliet” opening this week. Ask her and she chuckles because she knows the balancing act between meeting expectations while presenting something fresh.

“Romeo and Juliet” has so many quotes people recognize. Just the names, Romeo and Juliet, evoke images of love found and lost. The plot is well known: Two young people fall in love despite the blood feud between their respective families. It is a story so familiar it has been re-invented as a 20th century gang-war musical in “West Side Story” and dragged into a modern setting with the Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes movie “Romeo + Juliet.”

For VSU’s production, Wheeler foregoes any modernization. She keeps this “Romeo and Juliet” fettered to the Elizabethan period, or at least a 21st century audience’s interpretation of the Shakespearean era. She feels the contrast between modern dress and Shakespeare’s language is too jarring. Audiences expect the wardrobe to match the language.  

She also avoids the easy trap of trying to adapt the well-known 1968 Franco Zefferelli film to stage, with its sweeping instrumental music score.  Still … “Shakespeare remains very cinematic,” she says. “Everything moves from place to place. He moves the scenes easily from one place to the another.”

This movement draws the audience into the play. Modern audiences, especially those nursed on reading Shakespeare for high school literature classes, are often surprised how easy the dialogue is to understand when spoken well. Shakespeare wrote plays. His writing was designed to be heard, not read. Imagine reading the script to a popular movie. Scripts, like plays, are not novels, they are the  language framework for an auditory and visual experience.  With exception of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be …,” “Romeo and Juliet” may have one of the most recognized and caricatured lines in the Shakespearean repertoire: “What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east and Juliet is the sun.”

And there lies the rub.

VSU Theatre must overcome the depths of over-familiar caricature and make “Romeo and Juliet” fresh, something new, something as old as love but as exhilarating, as tender, as heart-breaking, as young love.

Audiences may forget that within this tale of love’s passion and despair lurks humor and battle. The VSU cast trained with Kelly Martin, a Macon-based fight choreographer. A recognized actor combatant with the Society of American Fight Directors and the British Academy of Stage and Screen Combat, Martin led the VSU student performers in the play’s sword fights.

Shakespeare’s language is both poetic and lyrical throughout this play. Revisiting Shakespeare’s words, one begins to recall just why “Romeo and Juliet” is one of the bard’s best-known works.

“Tragedy did not come easily to Shakespeare, yet all this play’s lyricism and comic genius cannot hold off the dawn that will become a destructive darkness,” writes Harold Bloom in “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.” “With just a few alterations, Shakespeare could have transformed ‘Romeo and Juliet’ into a play as cheerful as ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ The young lovers, escaped to Mantua or Padua, would not have been victims of Verona, or of bad timing, or of cosmological contraries asserting their sway. Yet this travesty would have been intolerable for us, and for Shakespeare: a passion as absolute as Romeo’s and Juliet’s cannot consort with comedy.”

And viewers may be struck by how little time which Romeo and Juliet have together, but how deeply their love runs. Deep enough to transcend the centuries, so that the very names of Romeo and Juliet have become a definition of young lovers.

“In a play in which so much happens too soon or too late,” writes Peter Holland of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, “the intensity with which Romeo and Juliet snatch time together may seem scant consolation but the only consolation possible.”

THE CAST: Chance Wall, Jake Martishius, Christy Kirkland, Myles Grier, Tom Poje, Emmanuel Davis, Ashley Anderson, Jeff Clifford, Amanda Layton, Kassandra Morris, Andrew Miller, Anthony Scott, Michael Morgan, Matthew Moran, Matthew Hogan, Antony Russell, Dom Torres, Joel Moseley, Rishik Patel, Logan Bush, Crystal Williams, April Weaver, Bryan Hopper, Mark L. Hance, Ryan Stillings, Esmond Pickett, Charlotte Grady, Rebecca Morris, Laura Montsalvatge, Natassia Johnson, Nathan Cohen.

SHOWTIME

Valdosta State University Theatre & Dance presents Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.”

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Oct. 7, 8, 9; 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 10; 7:30 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Oct. 11, 12, 13.

Where: Sawyer Theatre, VSU Fine Arts Building, corner of Oak and Brookwood.

Tickets: $12, adult; $10, senior adult; $8, child, or VSU student; $7, group rate of 10 or more.

Reservations, more information: Call (229) 333-5973; or visit www.valdosta.edu/comarts