Where art thou, G?

By Johathan Blackburn

Romeo leaps and springs from the carved stone seat to a bed of carnations by the garden gate. 

“Methinks the arrow of love doth pierce my loins,” he says. He picks a flower and nearly plugs his nose with it. 

“In love?” replies his bosom buddy Benvolio. “For what, only the third time this week?”

Benvolio folds his arms and rolls his eyes, huffing in disgust.

“Who is it now?” he snaps. 

“The fair maiden shineth like the new dawn,” trills Romeo. “Her eyes spew molten fires that forgeth the bonds of ever lasting love,”

He clasps his hands over his heart and exhales, as only a youth in love can. 

“Her name is Rosaline.”

Have you ever wondered about Romeo’s love life the morning before he met Juliet? Andrew Patten did. His dark comedy, Romeo and Rosaline, goes back before the murder and banishment, the false death and suicide. We go through a portal to a time when the only thing Romeo (Jason Sweeney) had to lose was his virginity. 

Rosaline (Soo Garay) comes forth as a 17th-century woman with late 20th-century ideas of women in society. Her rapier wit perfect foils a clumsy and awkward Romeo, disembowelling his childish attempt to win her. 

The play is something of a Revisionist tragedy. Patten snipped scenes from Shakespeare and brought out, through Rosalin, the glaring irony of the European-Renaissance society. He transposes an Elizabethan dialect with a modern slang and, in keeping with Renaissance literature, saturates it with sexual innuendo. 

Juliet, too, isn’t quite what you’d expect. Against the stalwart and rational Rosaline, Juliet seems somehow inadequate, almost pathetic, as she blindly babbles her way into Romeo’s seemingly spacious heart.