Interview: & JULIET by Playwright Robert Caisley at NJ Rep 5/4 to 6/4

The new play, & Juliet, written by Robert Caisley and directed by Marc Geller will have its premiere at New Jersey Repertory Company (NJ Rep) from May 4th to June 6th. & Juliet is Caisley's 3rd play for the company. Previous productions were Happy and Lucky Me, both of which received subsequent regional productions throughout the United States. Lucky Me had its European premiere at the Vana Baskini Teater in Tallinn, Estonia.

In the story of & Juliet, Charlie Vaughn is an idealistic young director who comes to a small conservative college campus to stage a production of Romeo & Juliet. When he announces his decision to cast a fourteen year-old boy in the role of Juliet, as was the Elizabethan custom, he challenges the "old school" sensibilities of the campus community and invites the wrath of a young black actress who feels her time is due. As a result, Charlie turns to his new colleague, a thirty-year veteran of the Drama Department, for advice on how to handle the student's challenge to his authority.

Broadwayworld.com had the opportunity to interview Robert Caisley about his career and his upcoming play & Juliet at NJ Rep.

Robert Caisley was born in Rotherham, England. His plays have been performed across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom and translated into Italian, French and Estonian. He currently serves as Head of Dramatic Writing at the University of Idaho, and is a Fellow in the Performing Arts from the Idaho Commission on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. In the past year he has had two new plays premiered at the Clarence Brown Theatre (The Open Hand) and B Street Theatre in Sacramento, CA (A Masterpiece of Comic ... Timing!), both of which have been recently published by Samuel French, Inc. Past productions at NJ Rep include Happy (2014) and Lucky Me (2015.)

What was your earliest interest in writing and theatre?

There are as many paths to becoming a writer as there are writers, and mine is not unique. But when the conscious thought first entered my imagination, "I want to write," the obvious form that writing took was the form most available to me in my childhood home. My father was, and still is, an actor-and his scripts, replete with marginal notes recording his character's intentions and blocking (in that secret argot we use in the theatre) 'Enter UR, cross to DL bar, pour whiskey, X to Center for mono. Exit R on blackout.') were a tantalizing goldmine. I greedily read his plays, and then attended as many productions as I could. I grew up in the UK, and in those days English class was a lot of memorization and reciting, a steady diet of Shakespeare, the Romantic poets, Oscar Wilde. I had one teacher who loved Shaw. I still have a vivid memory of seeing my father in a production of Hellman's The Little Foxes. I could only have been about 9 or 10 years old, but I can still picture the details of the set and costumes. It had a hypnotic effect on me even at that young age.

Tell us about a few of your mentors?

Since it was my father who first introduced me to the theatre, he is my first and most influential mentor. I've seen him in some wonderful roles over the years-Prospero being one of my favorites. I've also had a chance to direct him as well, which is always a treat-getting to boss the old man around a bit for a couple hours each day! He was most recently in productions of Proof and The Cherry Orchard that I directed. I owe my fledgling interest in the theatre to him.

However, the most important professional mentor I've had over the years is Jere Hodgin. Jere was the long-time Artistic Director of Mill Mountain Theatre. He was an early champion of my work, and has worked on more of my plays than any other director. He is the first person to whom I send early drafts of new work for comment. In fact, I sometimes send Jere a few pages at a time, or a fragment of a scene (which must be very annoying now I think about it) and he responds in ways both critical and encouraging that can make the difference between focusing intensely on one idea and scrapping another. It's great when he directs one of my plays, because we don't have to waste a lot of time talking about intention: he understand the intention implicitly because he was usually there at the very moment I created the scene. I trust his judgement completely. I'm sure every artist can think of that one person to whom they credit their initial faith in their own abilities. For me, it's Jere Hodgin.

I also have learned so much about my own aesthetic by working closely over many years with Randy Reinholz and Jean Bruce Scott. They are the artistic director and executive producer, respectively, of Native Voices Theatre Co-a company dedicated exclusively to the production and development of new plays by Native and First Nations playwrights. Their contribution to this field is without comparison. I have read scripts for them for years, and served as a consultant, dramaturg and occasionally as a director. Being exposed to a different kind of storytelling, an entirely different aesthetic, plays with such distinctive structures and conventions, has had a profound effect on my own writing. They also happen to be two of the most enthusiastic, talented and energetic people I know in the theatre, and just knowing them has been one of the great boons to my own life and career. Randy's own play Off The Rails opens at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this summer.

Tell us about your teaching and inspiration for & Juliet.

The idea for & Juliet came to me about five years ago, although I didn't know it at the time. I was preparing to teach a graduate seminar at the University of Idaho on the work of the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca. I encountered for the first time one of his lesser known plays called The Public, which was only published posthumously. The play is wildly experimental, surreal, and while stylistically it's nothing like & Juliet, at the heart of Lorca's play is the story of a theatre director who stages such a daring and audacious version of Romeo & Juliet that the audience literally revolts. I wasn't sure how I wanted to adapt Lorca's idea, until about a year later when I started working on a new play about the petty jealousies and treacheries of academic life. Since I had been teaching in theater departments at that point for over a decade, I had decided to set the action in one. I was calling the play Drama (not a great title) which was a dialogue between an old professor and a young one, and had more to do with the histrionics taking place off-stage in the offices and hallways of the department than on-stage where it should belong. The play was about deception and professional rivalry. At some point these two ideas conjoined in my imagination, and I started afresh, with a new title and a third character.

We love to know a little about your experience working with NJ Rep.

This is the third world premiere of one of my plays at NJ Rep, so it's become a real theatrical home for me. The other two are Happy and Lucky Me, which gone on to publication, productions around the country, and translation into foreign languages. In addition to producing my plays, NJ Rep has also hosted important readings of some of my other plays-The Open Hand, Winter and this play. Writing plays is a solitary practice, but getting them out there into the world requires a group effort. Having spent so much time at the writing desk, alone with your thoughts and only the characters for company, I can't tell you how important it is to be able to pick up the phone and know there is a theatre company eagerly awaiting to read your next play. You'd be surprised to hear how so few theatres operate this way. SuzAnne and Gabor have been a real life-line to so many playwrights.

The producers of professional theatre around the country are, by and large, a timid breed. Their timidity stems from assuming their audiences do not want to assume the challenge and risk of a new, untested play. Gabor Barabas and Suzanne Barabas at NJ Rep have discovered the exact opposite to be true. Their audiences really celebrate the arrival of a new play to the stage, because they've recognized what a rich experience it can be to see something unfold before your eyes for the very first time, to be part of the very first group of people witness to the birth of a new American play. I really enjoy attending one of my plays at NJ Rep as much I enjoy the thrill of having it performed. The audiences here, having been treated to such a wide variety of styles and subject matter, give off a kind of anticipatory energy that's so useful for a playwright to experience first-hand. When I see one of my plays done here for the first time, I am carefully listening to the audience's moment-to-moment antiphonal response to a particular line, a moment, a scene, a particular character's response. The audiences here are generous, but discerning, adventurous and perceptive. I rely on their judgement in making final revisions to the play.

Previews of & Juliet at New Jersey Repertory Company will begin May 4th. The opening night reception is Saturday, May 6th at 8:00 pm. The theatre is located at 179 Broadway in Long Branch. Performances are Thursdays and Fridays at 8:00 pm; Saturdays at 3:00 pm and Sundays at 2:00 pm through June 4th. For information and ticketing, please call 732.229.3166 and visit http://www.njrep.org/.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Robert Caisley

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