Romeo and Juliet

SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS Roy and Thomas go green.

Photo: Nick Ehrhardt

The physical pleasures and good intentions of open-air Shakespeare allow us to overlook minor flaws. The sheer joy of having finally arrived at summer, sitting on the grass, kicking off our shoes and soaking up both the sun and Shakespeare’s words make us awfully forgiving of a middling production, such as Purple Bench’s standard-issue Romeo and Juliet.

Director Zaradich cuts the script to 90 minutes without losing anything too vital—Paris doesn’t show up to confront Romeo in Juliet’s tomb, for instance. The match between Kyla Thomas’s sensible-seeming Juliet and Taylor Roy’s extra-petulant Romeo is a bit hard to swallow, however, and Roy’s seemingly aimless wandering around the playing area was only slightly less distracting than the low-flying planes approaching O’Hare. (Playing various Chicago Park District locations in coming weeks, the production began at the Northwest Side’s Horner Park.) But the 15-member cast is mostly solid, and at the first performance both Anna Glowacki’s eye-catching costumes and Adam Miller-Batteau’s tight swordfights proved attractive enough to kids from a neighboring birthday party, who brought over their chairs and set up camp; mission accomplished.

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