The Happy Ending Romeo and Juliet Didn’t Get
Wedding season has begun, doubly so in Central Park, where the Public Theatre’s Shakespeare in the Park season is kicking off with “Romeo and Juliet.” The star-crossed lovers have a wedding, of course, but their marriage is clandestine and tragically brief. Saheem Ali, who directs the Park production, wants to send the audience out with a little hope. So, each night, the play will end with a real couple tying the knot onstage after the performance. “Let’s demonstrate that we have the capacity to overcome tragedy, to overcome our worst impulses,” Ali said the other day. “And what better way than to end the first half of the show with the fictional marriage and the second half with an actual marriage?”
Ali’s production is set at the U.S.-Mexico border, with a Latino Romeo and a gringa Juliet; the stage at the Delacorte is dominated by an ominous slab of border wall. Before rehearsals, Ali took a research trip to Laredo, Texas, to see the actual wall nearby. At a coffee shop, he met an artist who makes collages out of paper money, including a dollar-bill Jesus. The artist and his fiancée showed him videos of border marriages, and Ali invited the pair to New York to get married onstage one night. “Then we decided to expand the idea and do it every night,” he said at the theatre, just before the first preview.
The production had already booked couples for thirty of the thirty-two performances—mostly weddings, with a few vow renewals, including for the actors playing Benvolio and Pedro. The Public didn’t want to advertise online, fearing a deluge, so it found couples by word of mouth. Francis Jue, the actor playing Friar Lawrence, became an ordained officiant through the Universal Life Church. (So did his understudy, just in case.) Like any good wedding planner, the theatre has a rainy-day backup—a backstage area where the weddings can go on even if the show doesn’t.
The Public also hired a wedding coördinator, Carla Perez, who ushered in the inaugural couple, Kay Wasil and Teague Hollister. Both are trans, and they wore matching suits—Wasil’s white, Hollister’s jade—which they’d spent the week embroidering. Wasil, who has a neon-green mullet, adjusted the beaded boutonnière on Hollister’s lapel. Both perform as drag kings, Wasil under the name Chevy Lace and Hollister as Hugh Mann Race. They met at a drag show in Brooklyn in 2021. “I was, like, Wow, this person’s so cute,” Hollister recalled. “We started hanging out, and Kay gave an impassioned speech about how you should never date within the drag community. I was, like, Heard.”
But they grew close on subway rides home from shows—“A lot of late nights taking the Q from Manhattan all the way to deep Flatbush, me half in drag makeup,” Wasil said—and started dating. They got engaged last fall, lakeside, in Prospect Park. “I kept waiting to propose to you, and boaters kept getting stuck in the algae,” Hollister recalled. Wasil counter-proposed during a weekend upstate, and they celebrated with a trip to a haunted house. They were thinking City Hall, but then Hollister, who’s done crew work at the Public, got Perez’s e-mail looking for couples. The play’s tragic ending didn’t deter them. “I hope that’s not an omen,” Wasil said.
Growing up on opposite ends of Pennsylvania, both had read “Romeo and Juliet” as teens. “When I was in eighth grade, my mom looked at me and went, ‘True love is for thirteen-year-olds and mental patients,’ ” Hollister said. “I’ve always thought of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in that light, until I started reëvaluating it more recently. It’s not just, like, ‘Look at these crazy kids!’ It’s ‘Look at these systemic forces that are making two people choose to die rather than love and exist.’ ”
At seven o’clock, Perez and Jue walked the couple through a “wedding call”: they’d sit separately, get miked at intermission, and come onstage before curtain call. “I’m not using any binary terms like ‘husband’ or ‘wife,’ ” Jue told them.
“That’s the ideal,” Wasil said.
Hours later, the show was over, and Jue, in his friar costume, turned to the audience and announced, “Romeo and Juliet didn’t get their lifetime together, but tonight there is a couple here who would like to commit to their lifetime together, with all of you as their witnesses.” The crowd gasped, then erupted in cheers. Jue brought up Wasil and Hollister, who knelt facing each other, as Romeo and Juliet had in Act II. Repeating after Jue, they pledged their love “for all the risings and settings of the sun” and exchanged rings.
They bowed with the cast and exited stage right, where they signed the marriage license beneath a trellis overlooking Turtle Pond. Ecstatic friends greeted them backstage. (The Public had set aside seats, but some had waited in line for free tickets that day.) “Fucking betrothed!” one yelled. The group formed a tunnel with their arms for the couple to run through, and they took photos outside the theatre, in front of a statue of Romeo and Juliet leaning in for a kiss. ♦