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 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).
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