Linnea Ritland | Amateur Dramatics / 2019

role switch

by Douglas Messerli

 

Linnea Ritland (screenwriter and director) Amateur Dramatics / 2019 [7 minutes]

 

A practice session before casting of the school production of Romeo and Juliet is just breaking up, Charlie (Kenneth Tynan), his girlfriend, and her friend packing up to leave, as they say goodnight to James (Louis Lin) who has clearly decided to stay on a while later in the auditorium to practice.

     He walks to the headlights and begins Romeo’s love scene with Juliet:

 

“But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.”

 

    James shouts out the lyrics like the rank amateur that he is. Unable to put any true feeling behind the lines, it is as if he were struggling to even understand the words he speaks, let alone reveal his wonderment of the vision before him. Suddenly, Charlie has returned and stands behind him, commenting on how bad the performance is, and insisting that he can do better.

     James is peeved, understandably, by his peer’s comments, particularly since he perhaps knows that Charlie, also up for the role, is a far better actor. But Charlie insists he’s not trying to interrupt, and thinks it’s “cute” that James is soldiering on. But there’s no point to a performance without someone watching, he argues.

     The would-be Romeo suggests that if Charlie wants to be the audience, he has to sit quietly and just watch. Once again, James shouts out his lines, Charlie unable to withhold a giggle in the background.

     He apologizes and moves toward James, suggesting he should imagine something that he wants most in the world but cannot have. James quietly contemplates that possibility as Charlie stands beside him face to face. “Now the thing that you want is right in front of you. Desire it.”

     James begins over, this time softly, in awe almost of what he has evidently thought of to himself and maybe actually seeing it before him—although this is pure conjecture on our part. But his acting is so immediately improved we must imagine that something has transpired within.

     Charlie now moves behind him and provides him with a shoulder rub to further relax him, as James speaks the lines now quite wonderfully. But Charlie ruins the moment by suggesting that by acting in that way, James will certainly be in the cast with him.

     James suddenly pulls away angrily, “You think you’re fucking better than me?” He walks hurriedly off, with Charlie shouting after for him to wait.

     Suddenly, he calls out Romeo’s lines for earlier in the play:

 

“If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.”

 

       James stops in his tracks, and takes over Juliet’s role, becoming, in effect, Juliet to Charlie’s Romeo, a role he has been playing, we now perceive, all along.

 

“Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

Which mannerly devotion shows in this;

For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,

And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.”

 

       And like the couple of Shakespeare’s play, they put their hands together to continue to scene which ends in a deep kiss—just as it does here between the two boys. Charlie finally breaks the miraculous kiss with Romeo’s last line, which takes on a far more fascinating meaning here:

“Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged.”

 

       At that very moment, we hear the voice of Charlie’s girlfriend calling as she too returns with the other girl asking if he found what he wanted. We’ll be late, she reports, as Charlie calls out to James, “I’ll text you.”

       After they leave, James walks once again to the footlights, but this time is far too stunned, confused perhaps, and overwhelmed to speak.

       The amateurs, through Canadian director Linnea’s Ritland’s script and provocation, have now become something closer to real actors or perhaps real lovers. Only time will tell which.

 

Los Angeles, February 24, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2023).