...Will you Walk?

Romeo and Juliet closes this weekend, I am sad/glad to say. Glad because I could use the free time; sad because the show has been an unqualified triumph, and I will miss it. I will mark the occasion with a few thoughts on the character I have played, Mercutio.


I'll start with the trendy: No, I don't think he's gay, or at least, not explicityly so. One is free to read homoerotic longings into the character's lines if one so desires, his seeming misogyny and affection for his young friend leaves such a possibility open. Since I've gotten the role, everyone else in the cast has made a point of assuming that Merc was a card-carrying GLAAD member, mostly to annoy me. I have only myself to blame, for getting annoyed about it. To my mind, playing an ambiguous character as "gay" immediately takes all the complexity away from him; it's an instant plot point. No matter what facets you add, the gayness sticks out like a pink thumb, becoming the explanation for all his motivations and actions. Blame our politicized attitudes towards sexuality, but there it is. I don't mean to suggest that gay characters (and certainly not gay people) have no complexity, but I think ambiguity should remain ambiguous.


Instead, my Merc became the Poet-Solipsist. He is the only character in the play for whom the Capulet-Montague feud is a matter of complete irrelevance; his rank as the Prince's kin puts him outside its purview, and unlike his cousin Paris, he has no intention of getting in. He regards the conflict as beneath his attention: "By my heel, I care not." If Mercutio can be said to be interested in anything, it is Freedom. He drinks when he wants to, parties when he wants to, mocks whomever crosses his path, and fights to put fighters in their place, not to be a Fighter. His concern for Romeo is that his obsession with Young Love will make a slave of him. The bulk of the Queen Mab is aimed at mocking the illogical unconcious that Romeo is so taken with. For the end of that speech, my director and I decided to make Merc come completely unglued; I decided that he speaks from experience, having shagged his share of Rosalines, perhaps leaving one pregnant, to meet a dark fate. Guilt and self-mockery thus overwhelm him; when he says "This is the hag/when maids lie on their backs/that presses them, and learns them first to bear/making them women of good carriage," the hag he means is at once the mythical Mab, the idea of Love, and himself.


But what, you say, of his duel with Tybalt? The Tybalt of our show was determined not to play him as the Black Knight of the Capulets, an inveterate bastard who loves no one and deserves his death at Romeos hands. In our reading of the script, we saw Tybalt as a Capulet-by-Marriage, who must constantly prove his loyalty to la famiglia. His dislike of Romeo is casual, but to his mind, decisive: Romeo broke the rules by crashing the Caps' banquet, he deserves punishment. In this fashion, Tybalt serves as the archetype not for the Villian, but for the Warrior.


That duel with Mercutio thus becomes a duel for Romeo's soul: will he be a Poet or a Warrior, a Laugher or a Fighter? Mercutio loses, both his life and his struggle, and Tybalt wins, though his victory devours him. The fact that Merc only dies because Romeo, eager to protect his friend's life from the Prince's death-to-duelists decree, steps in and leaves him open to a half-hearted thrust by Tybalt that Merc could easily have countered, but compounds the tragic irony. In seeking to protect his bon vivant friend, Romeo kills him, and makes himself the Death-Dealer, who takes Tybalt, Paris, and ultimately Juliet with him.


So that's our show, wounds coming from wounds leading to wounds, until the flowers die and everyone wakes up to a winter morn.