3rd Play - 7/3/23 - MERCUTIO LOVES ROMEO LOVES JULIET LOVES - by Gina Femia

Still excited by the prospect of young adult roles, I read yet another Gina Femia play set in a Catholic School, with some references to a Shakespeare play. Apologies for repetitiveness, but the subject clearly fascinated me! Last one for a while, I promise.

Summary: "Ellie and Britt have been lifelong friends, lifelong haters of cheerleaders and lifelong drama geeks so when their All Girls Catholic School's drama club does Romeo and Juliet, obviously they'll be a part of it. But when Amber, a cheerleader with an injury unexpectedly gets the lead across from Britt, Ellie's heart is turned upside down. Actually, all their hearts are. A new queer kinda adaptation of Romeo and Juliet." (New Play Exchange)

I loved: The love triangle in this piece is heartbreaking. You see it from the beginning, and you know that there won't be a happy ending here. I thought the comparison to the Mercutio/Romeo/Juliet relationship was interesting, and I want to reread R & J to see if the idea of Mercutio being in love with Romeo holds up, because I think that's very interesting. The scenes of the girls in each pair finally getting honest with each other about their feelings is nice, and ***SPOILER*** kind of devastating, although you knew from the beginning that things wouldn't end up well. I thought the playwright captured young love nicely.

What I didn’t love: I liked the play overall, but thought it was a little more on the nose than the one from yesterday. I was a little disappointed by the ending, although I get it, and a good director will make that section work, probably, especially with music and other technical elements. However, I felt it sort of left us hanging at how things ended up in the play’s present, even if we don’t need a complete resolution.

Overall: The core of the play is the love triangle between the girls, which you can see in the title. Even though you know where we are headed from the beginning, the way it develops is sweet, funny and real. Other fun things in the play were the relation to Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, and pokes at LGBTQ+ prejudice from the Catholic church. However the overall thrust seemed to focus on teen crushes made more complicated by confusion over learning who you are as a teenager and what your sexual preferences are. The ending was a little disappointing for me, but the lesson about how the devastation of rejection fades in time is valuable, without minimizing the feelings of the characters. The play is honest and poignant, but didn’t hold me as much as Femia’s The Virtuous Fall … from yesterday.

Here’s a link to Google Sheets with more info about the play: Play a Day Sheet

If you want to know more about Gina Femia: http://www.femiagina.com/