Depending on your feelings towards suicidal romances, you might find this suggestion to be either obvious or entirely off the mark. But I'll risk your mockery and say it: for Valentine's Day, you should take your date to Shakespeare's R & J.
If haven't seen an earlier production of R & J, let's get this out of the way: the play isn't quite Romeo and Juliet. Joe Calarco, who adapted and directs the play, cuts the cast down to four male characters, each of whom plays an unnamed student at a repressive boarding school. The boys first appear dressed in crisp uniforms, walking in military-like formation and reciting Latin conjugations.
One boy - let's call him R - has hidden away a presumably-forbidden copy of Romeo and Juliet. At night the four friends sneak into an empty room and start a particularly vibrant table-read of the play. They shift between characters, scenes, locations and emotions with barely any tools to assist them: the set is minimalist and the props are almost nonexistent. There's a couple of chairs, a trunk, a piece of red fabric, and that's it. Some inventive lighting and occasionally over-the-top sound design push the play slightly towards the supernatural, but overall, the magic comes in the able acting of the four men onstage, who each play their double roles admirably. As Tybalt, Mercutio and Romeo, they slay each other; as students, they roughhouse. As Veronan friends and enemies, they crudely mock each other; as 20th-century teenage boys, they do the same. As Romeo and Juliet, they fall in love, as schoolboys… well. That's the question.
Romeo and Juliet was always begging for a revamp. She's a thirteen-year-old girl with no sense of perspective and he's got impulse control issues and a habit of obsessing over pretty women. After an implausibly quick wooing they make a series of very bad decisions: let's be honest, these two screw-ups have no business being the English-speaking world's symbol of love. Fortunately, Calarco's reframing of the text gives it a new, stronger resonance.
Take Romeo and Juliet's first conversation, when they build a sonnet together, suggesting how quickly and effortlessly they became a perfect pair. Calarco uses that famous "palmer's kiss" to reject the idea of easy love and show Romeo and Juliet testing the waters, seeing where their boundaries are.
The men on stage enact this delicate dance as the famed lovers, and simultaneously as the two schoolboys, negotiating just how far they're willing to go. The pretense of the play only barely masks the sexual tension behind the students' acting, and with their performances they ask each other perilous questions: Where are our boundaries? And here's where R & J cuts through the semi-mystic reputation of Shakespeare's classic to expose a deeper truth: love is terrifying.
Rejection. Humiliation. Exploitation. An eruption of physical violence. Revealing desire is risky in any context, but in R & J, set in a world that punishes homosexual desire, the danger is palpable. The boys sit, not looking at each other, on a bench in the middle of a bare stage. They are trying to decide whether to hold hands, and that small choice puts everything at risk. It's a long moment, Shakespeare's famed dialogue slipping out in stutters, the audience's collective breath catching in their throats. Every heartbeat urges do it do it do it -- and then, of course, they do, and it's joyous, it's beautiful. But the risks of loving never fade away.
That frisson of danger -- that's why you should see R & J on Valentine's Day, that godforsaken holiday that reduces our most intense emotions to Hallmark drivel. Fight the defanging of romance. Let Calarco's adaptation remind you that love is all about the terrifying risk of realizing you might not be loved back, and loving anyway.
