Based on the national press coverage that West Philly’s Curio Theater received in the past month, you’d think they were staging The Tempest, not Shakespeare’s iconic love story Romeo & Juliet. After the flame war following Philly Magazine’s announcement that Romeo would be a woman and this classic love story would now become a Sapphic one, online news stories popped up like western wildfires everywhere from the New York Times to the Drudge Report. But despite the fire and brimstone from those who didn’t get the Supreme Court’s message that love is love when DOMA was overturned this past June, the online protesters who seemed comfortable judging a very old "book" by its cover, blessedly, stayed home. Director Krista Apple-Hodge’s adaptation of Romeo & Juliet starring Rachael Gluck and Isa St. Clair as the titular characters opened without a hitch.

But this is not your grandmother’s Shakespeare. Apple-Hodge’s paring of the script supports the production to run lean and mean leaping over the expectations of the audience from the opening bell to final death knell. Compared with other productions, Curio’s Romeo & Juliet is more like a spirited MMA match; it darts to strike then spryly steps away, dancing across its multi-level stage from scene to scene, peppering us with more than enough shots of humor or action or both to keep our attention for the full 2 hours and 20 minutes.

And if you’ve never seen a production in Curio’s home in the Cavalry Center for Culture and Community, a reclaimed church on Baltimore Avenue in West Philadelphia, you’re missing a truly unique theater experience. From the moment you arrive and enter the house, you know you’re in for something different, as you climb up and into the set to find your seats at the very edge of the stage that rises up like a hidden piazza or private garden of modern day Verona all around you, enclosing you in its architectural arms, the seats at stage level just inches from the actors. A turret soars above and over you (or next to you if you climb into the balcony seats), reaching out and over the stage like a sentinel, soon to be occupied by the Prince. Opposing this is Juliet’s famous balcony whose rear wall glitters with the ostentation of her rich Capulet family, incorporating the old church's pipe organ within it.  Adjacent at stage level is the choir loft become Friar’s cell and lovers’ sanctuary complete with medieval church doors. The stage itself an Italian marble inlaid floor, a covered fountain or former monument long since forgotten at its center, a stage within a stage. Or so the set design, brilliantly done by Paul Kuhn in minimalist fashion, would have us believe. For Curio's productions pride themselves on offering an intimate and affordable theater experience without the Avenue of the Arts price tag, allowing your mind to embellish everything you see before you. For an extra treat, those who sit at main stage level should be prepared to be directly engaged in the show. This rough Hexagon with its intimate seating and audience interactivity echoes the Globe Theater where the play was originally staged in 16th century Victorian England.

What struck me in this performance was just how funny the play is. If Aaron Sorkind and William Shakespeare had a love child, then Apple-Hodge's adaptation would be it. The actors banter back and forth with casually precise diction until you forget that you are listening to Elizabethan English spoken in iambic pentameter, other wise known as oddly familiar sounding words in sentences that rhyme–to those of us who haven’t stepped into the confines of an English class for a while. Time flies until you reach the intermission to catch your breath and marvel that this is Shakespeare (And in a good way)? It now seems standard that every child in America read this play in Junior High School. This production is a must see for anyone who’s never understood why. Sex, violence, murder, family, love, faith, doubt. The things all teens deal with that adults pretend they don’t. Borders may have changed. Countries may have risen and fallen. Marriage customs may have shifted in the public square. But we are still more the same than we are different. And the same can be said of Romeo & Juliet.

I spoke to nearly every member of the company and was surprised to learn that the choice to make Romeo a woman, and therefore Romeo & Juliet a lesbian relationship, was not a political one, even if the timing seems to belie that. "We were in a meeting about what we wanted to do for next season when (Apple-Hodges) said ‘Let's do Romeo & Juliet with two women,’ and Rachel (Romeo) and I said, ‘Absolutely!’" said to Steve Carpenter who plays Benvolio, Friar John, and the First Watchman. (Almost every actor in the play doubles in more than one role, common for small theater company productions.) DOMA had just been stuck down. Apple-Hodges said the idea came more from the fact that "we wanted explore what was now possible in reality" than challenge it. To those of us who spend our lives fighting for equal rights, this might initially sound like a cop out. Not so. In fact, it was clear that every member of the company had a sense of respect for undertaking a play where three major roles that had previously been men were now women. Each person spoke independently of how they felt privileged in their own lives to see the central relationship between Romeo & Juliet as just one of many possibilities that exist, not as something "special" or "different" as so many critics of LGBT civil rights often attempt to paint our ongoing efforts to seek equality. It stuck me as I watched Romeo & Juliet meet and fall in love, just how normal and mundane it all was. And isn't that what we're fighting for–to make our lives, our careers, and our loves, equal in every way to the stories of those around us?

In fact, Curio's entire season this year has a theme of exploring gender in all its productions. The key to this production is the relationships between the actors. Curio is a community-based theater with most of its actors from West Philadelphia. Many company members have been with Curio for several years and it shows in the depth of their connections on stage.

The two central characters, deftly played by Gluck and St. Clair, offer every Lesbian or Queer woman a rare moment of public acknowledgement. St. Clair sparkles irrepressibly as Juliet, a young woman of privilege who's never had a date and is exploring her options and parental boundaries at the same time. Gluck's Romeo knows who she is and what she wants and isn't afraid to go for it even as she ardently sways from one love to the next: two different women from two different families both recognizable to any modern audience member. So this is what it looks like to have our lives and loves as Lesbians (or any woman who’s ever loved a woman no matter what her label) be reflected and respected in the public square and the cannon of English literature.

But it’s not just Romeo who’s become a woman in this version of the play. Both Tybalt and Lady Capulet are women as well, and the play never misses a beat. This Tybalt, played by Colleen Hughes (who also gives new and vibrant life to the Nurse in an astonishing shift in other scenes) seethes with a kind of barely containable rage that threatens to spit, like the Prince of Cats, her namesake. She’d be right at home with modern day female action heroes. Lady Capulet, played by Aetna Gallagher, reads like any powerful career women we might know, a woman who is the breadwinner for her family and yet has moments of conflict when she wishes she could turn back time and spend just a few more moments at home with her young daughter instead of in the board room. And so, she shelters Juliet to extend her adolescence.

But it’s not only the women who make waves. Eric Scotolati plays Mercutio with an irrepressible wit and pugilistic humor that rivals Falstaff. His antics drive the play forward when it might otherwise slow and his clear infatuation for Romeo redefines their relationship. Josh Hitchens takes a moving turn as Friar Lawrence. Harry Slack balances the bumbling romantic overtures of Paris with the stern commands of the Prince. Ken Opdenaker offers us the sort of perfectly out of touch and self absorbed progressive father that would give birth to Romeo as Lord Montague. Steve Carpenter's loyal and honest yet rabble rousing Benvolio humorously completes the company cast.

Add this to the Sound Design of Patrick Lamborn, whose choices in terms of music to accompany and sounds to augment the play, when matched with the costume and props, make the play feels current.

"We just wanted to tell a story about regular families," says Gallagher (Lady Capulet). And so the play does. Krista Apple-Hodge’s Romeo & Juliet presents a world ruled and run by powerful women, whether their power is position, rage, a silver tongue or youthful optimism, and is balanced by the men who love, serve, and fight along side them. Not since Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film adaptation of the play have fans and critics alike had so much to shout about.

Curio's Romeo & Juliet runs until Nov. 2. For tickets and more information, visit: www.curiotheatre.org.

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