Not too long ago, I saw a production of Edward Albee’s Zoo Story that had been staged at Marqeutte University’s Engineering Hall Visualization Lab. It was an interesting experiment: a play about a couple of guys meeting in a park was staged against a projected backdrop of a park that was made to simulate an actual park. Kind of a fun novelty to see a digital background on a show.
This coming weekend Marquette brings theatre back to the lab again with an abbreviated staging of Romeo & Juliet. The Engineering Hall Visualization Lab has produced the digital backdrop of fair Verona for a few performances of Shakespeare’s classic. Marquette is welcoming a number of local performance groups to perform a heavily truncated version of the script in the Unrehearsed Shakespeare format. Actors have nothing in front of them but a scroll with their own lines and cues. And the actors? Only three of them per cast. (It’s a very small space.) It’s a fun format. Sketch comedy groups Broadminded and Sketch Marks will each have performance slots. As will the Summit Players and Bard and Bourbon. They’re also staging performances with Marquette University faculty and Marquette Theater students.
The show runs Apr. 15 - 17. Groups will be performing at 6:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. slots. For the schedule of performances and links to ticket reservations, visit the show’s Facebook events page.
