Staging Puerto Rican Culture: Speaking Spanish and English in Romeo and Juliet

Among the fascinating aspects of Folger Theatre’s Romeo and Juliet is the use of bilingual staging methods for the Capulet women, who are Puerto Rican in this production. Dramaturg Carla Della Gatta writes about the past associations between Romeo and Juliet and Puerto Rico on stage and screen, as well as the challenges of creating the bilingual staging. An associate professor of theater and performance studies at the University of Maryland, she is a past Folger fellow, the author of Latinx Shakespeares (2023), and co-editor of Shakespeare and Latinidad (2021). She also created LatinxShakespeares.org.

Staging Shakespeare today often involves integrating a concept for the play that was not part of its original performance or embedded in the script. Theater is a mixture of time periods—the period in which the action is set, the period in which the play was written, when it was first performed, and today’s world. For new plays that are written, set, and staged in the 2020s, these four time periods are the same. What today’s Shakespearean performance often includes is a fifth period: the era in which the director has set the action that differs from the script.

In our current Folger Theatre production of Romeo and Juliet, the setting is Washington, DC, in 2024, and the Capulet women are Puerto Rican (that includes Juliet’s cousin Tybalt, who in this production is played by a female actor). This connection to Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans is far from the first time that they have been linked to the play. Romeo and Juliet was adapted for Puerto Rican culture by the famous non-Puerto Rican creators of West Side Story (the 1957 musical and the 1961 and 2022 films), placing a gang of Puerto Ricans in opposition to a white gang in 1950s New York. It is also transposed to a fully Puerto Rican setting in Antonio Morales’s For Love in the Caserio / El Amor en el Caserío, set in a housing project in San Juan. Morales’s play has been performed more than 500 times and was made into a film in 2014. Romeo and Juliet, including scenes and an adaptation of the play, has been performed at la Universidad de Puerto Rico in 2003, 2016, and 2020. More than 60 Latinx-themed adaptations and productions have been staged in the US in the last 20 years, each with some Spanish integrated into the script.

Director Raymond O. Caldwell’s vision for Romeo and Juliet was to create “a love letter to DC” and within that, to depict generational differences within a Puerto Rican family, the Capulets. The purpose was not to set a Latinx culture in opposition to whiteness or to adapt Shakespeare’s “ancient grudge” to youth gangs. Instead, our creative team wanted the ethnicity of the Capulet women to be an authentic portrayal of Puerto Rican characters, to push against West Side Story’s original monolithic characterization—that is much improved in the 2022 film—as well as the casting of mostly non-Latinx actors to play the Capulets while still imposing Mexican-Catholic imagery and some Spanish in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet film.

How did we integrate Puerto Rican culture into a Shakespearean play? We used a multi-layered approach, involving casting, translation, bilingual staging methods, and candid conversations about how ethnicity functions within the demographics of Washington, DC. Fran Tapia, a Chilean-born singer, dancer, and actress was cast as Lady Capulet and Luz Nicolás, a Spanish-born actress, as the Nurse, which brought two of GALA Hispanic Theatre’s most notable actors to the Folger stage. Caro Reyes Rivera, who plays Juliet, is fresh from her MFA studies at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University, where she recently played Hamlet in a bilingual adaptation; she is Puerto Rican and trained in classical acting.  These three actors are not only bilingual, but they have acted in bilingual theater. Bilingual theater includes the use of two languages; in this case, the Capulet women shift between Spanish and English as they speak. The casting of Alina Collins Maldonado as Tybalt also resonates with DC audiences; Collins Maldonado too is a bilingual actor and has performed in English, Spanish, and bilingual productions in the DC area for years. Bilingual Shakespeares have a lengthy history, something I got to touch on in the Folger’s Shakespeare Unlimited podcast, and Romeo and Juliet extends this genealogy to the Folger this year.

Casting Hispanic and Latinx bilingual actors was a crucial component, as it brings native speakers of Spanish onstage. But casting alone cannot achieve a realistic depiction of identity onstage. Shakespeare’s scripts are almost always modified and cut for production. Ours was adapted by Caleen Sinnette Jennings, who cut some of the Greco-Roman mythic references in the dialogue and modernized some lines to nod to the use of technology and the contemporary setting of the production. The scenes with the Capulet women were translated into Spanish by Rosa Garay López, a Puerto Rican translator of plays and a certified medical interpreter. This placed the Spanish specifically into a Puerto Rican context; Spanish differs by region and culture just as much as any other language. The expressions, slang, and cadences of pronunciation were part of the rehearsal process for the actors, and they worked with Garay on both the language and pronunciation for those scenes.

The script and actors then took the Spanish-language scenes into rehearsal with the larger ensemble. One of my roles as dramaturg was to collaborate with the team to integrate the Spanish realistically. For example, Tapia’s Lady Capulet speaks mostly Spanish in the home to her daughter and the Nurse, but she speaks English in public spaces, and to her non-Spanish-speaking husband. This permits her use of Spanish to foster intimacy with the other women in her home. She also employs English as a power move; she is the only character who addresses the Nurse as “Nurse,” whereas everyone else, including the Friar, addresses the Nurse affectionately as “Nana.” Nicolás’s Nurse is a character who moves through spaces on errands more so than the other female characters in the play. As a result, her bilingualism is more seemingly fluid, even though her shifts between languages require effort or seem comical at times. Juliet is a generation younger than her mother and her Nurse, and she knows that English comes more easily to her than to them. When her mother asks a question in Spanish and she replies in English, it is a willful adolescent response. But when she eagerly awaits the Nurse’s news from Romeo, she coaxes her in Spanish, the Nurse’s native language.

But language is not the only determinant of culture, and culture is not solely determined by language. The Friar, played by Brandon Carter, who is not Puerto Rican, wants to reach his congregation, especially the young people, who he appeals to on social media. He speaks a few words in Spanish to engage his public, greeting the Nurse in Spanish. By contrast, the suitor chosen by Juliet’s parents for her is the wealthy, handsome Puerto Rican Paris, portrayed by Puerto Rican actor Gabriel Alejandro. Having succeeded in the larger US culture, Paris uses Spanish sparingly, in the few moments when he speaks to Juliet and when he expresses shock and grief at her supposed death.

Creating realistic Puerto Rican characters was central to the concept for the show, and for our creative team, listening to the actors was the most crucial part of the process. As they were speaking Shakespearean verse in English or Spanish, we listened for the rhythms, beats, and accents in the language to ensure they synced with the choreography, movement, and design of the scene. The actors played with changing words into one language or another, modernizing or retaining Shakespeare’s language, and together we created a world that speaks across time. This kind of collaborative process is what makes “dramatic literature” into theater. It is a process that Shakespeare himself was invested in and through it, he altered his scripts for performances during his lifetime, too.