“I don’t give in to the stars,” says Daniel Bravo Hernández.
“Me neither,” says Ra’Mya Latiah Aikens, “but it’s a great icebreaker.”
The leads of the Public Theater’s Romeo and Juliet—which will be staged in Central Park this summer for Shakespeare in the Park—aren’t talking about star-crossed lovers, exactly, but about astrology. We’re sitting at a table in Cocina Consuelo, a lively Harlem restaurant run by a Dominican chef and her Mexican husband. It’s two weeks before rehearsals start, and the colorful setting, with live music and bold tile patterns, fits perfectly with our conversation about this cross-cultural production, directed by Saheem Ali. Hernández, 24, smiles shyly as I explain the restaurant’s story: the chef impulsively followed her friend on a trip back to Mexico, where they fell in love; the friends-and-family supper club they started later grew into two brick-and-mortar locations. Hernández, who grew up in Inwood, about 50 blocks north, is also Mexican Dominican, and feels right at home ordering a glass of hibiscus juice.
Hernández may not believe in horoscopes, but some stroke of luck has clearly helped him. Growing up, he says he “didn’t know New York was an acting hub.” He studied acting at SUNY Purchase, and after graduating, made his Broadway debut in the 2024 revival of Romeo and Juliet, led by Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler, playing the servant Abraham and Friar John. Hernández kept booking gigs around the city while working at a gym near the Public Theater. He was on his way to rehearsals for an Off Broadway show, carrying two 35-pound weights, when two of the Public’s casting directors spotted him. The next day, an email arrived inviting him to audition as an understudy for Ali’s upcoming park production. He went in, “was exceptional,” Ali remembers, and landed the lead instead.
Around the same time, Aikens, 26, was feeling unsure about her budding career. She grew up in a small town in Georgia, where singing was her first love. “But I was really shy,” she says, “so my family had to convince me to sing at church or anywhere.” Her high school choir director encouraged her to try musical theater, and she eventually entered New York University’s graduate drama program in 2022. She played Hermia in the Classical Theatre of Harlem’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“Juliet, if she could have a happy ending,” she says) and got a small part in One Night Only, a rom-com starring Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner that comes out later this year. But her mother passed away unexpectedly last December, and the grief dimmed any sense of celebration. When the audition for Juliet came up, she had been reading Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell’s exploration of grief in Shakespeare’s life, and she found herself suddenly “looking forward to something again.” At her callback, Aikens read the scene where Juliet, potion in hand, wrestles with the thought of death. She got the job on the spot.
THAT WHICH WE CALL A ROSE…
The production’s design is influenced by Mexican culture, including Día de Muertos. Here, Aikens wears makeup inspired by the holiday and a Carolina Herrera dress.
Despite their relative youth, both actors are experienced Shakespeare veterans. Hernández says he’d like to direct the lesser-known King John one day; Aikens points to a 2023 production of Twelfth Night with Kara Young as a key influence. They’ve learned firsthand how immediate a centuries-old play can be when stripped of pretension. Hernández has performed with the Public’s Mobile Unit, which puts on free productions across the city’s five boroughs—in parks, community centers, and correctional facilities—and Aikens has taken part in a similar program. Shakespeare is “not about doing it ‘properly,'” she says, “but doing it with as much heart as you can, and in that way, it’s absolutely for everyone.”
Somewhat surprisingly, this is only the fourth time in the 70-year history of Shakespeare in the Park that Romeo and Juliet has been staged.In the entire history of Shakespeare in the Park, Romeo and Juliet has only been staged a few times. The last production was in 2007, with Oscar Isaac and Lauren Ambrose playing the lovers. (The New York Times called Ambrose, with her red hair and luminous pale skin, “a Juliet truly to die for.”) Delacorte productions usually aim for a fresh take—and this cast is aware they want to go beyond that expectation. “With most recent Shakespeare productions, it’s ‘We need this now more than ever,’ and I’m like, Do we?” asks Hernández. “Because then you watch the show, and what did it actually say? If you’re going to do Shakespeare, have a point of view.”
Ali certainly has a new—and urgent—interpretation. During the first of several calls, the director is clear about his vision but open to how it might evolve. His longtime friend Lupita Nyong’o tells me that’s one of his best qualities—his ability to “grow exponentially with every project.” Ali first encountered Shakespeare a few years after his father, an airline pilot, took him from their home in Nairobi to visit London. Blown away by a West End production of Grease, he convinced his high school to let him stage an adaptation (he played Danny Zuko, of course). This caught the attention of a local theater owner, who cast the 17-year-old Ali as Mercutio, opposite Nyong’o (then 14) as Juliet. Nyong’o remembers his magnetic presence on stage, as well as his brotherly protectiveness at their closing-night party. It was “the first time I’d ever been to a discotheque,” she says.
“We were Black and brown kids, and we spoke in our own dialects,” Ali says. “My introduction to Shakespeare involved me as an African, sounding like an African and being an African.” He was confused, then, when he moved to Boston to study theater at Northeastern in the late ’90s and found that Shakespeare productions were “all white people talking with a British accent.” Nyong’o, who grew up listening to her father recite Shakespeare, similarly says she “learned to be intimidated” once she encountered the idea in college “that Shakespeare was this elitist thing you have to reach for.”
“If you’re going to do Shakespeare, have a point of view,” says Hernández.
Ali’s career took off when he started alternating countercultural pieces like Hair with gigs for Boston’s Commonwealth Shakespeare Company. After moving to New York, he began collaborating with now-renowned Black dramatists like Jocelyn Bioh and Donja R. Love. In 2020, he was appointed the Public Theater’s associate artistic and resident director, and he has used this role to develop new works by artists from marginalized communities. According to the Public’s longtime artistic director, Oskar Eustis, “Ali has been a champion of young directors since the moment he arrived. Saheem has the perspective that if we don’t develop directors who both believe what we believe and can handle stages like the Delacorte, we’re going to be in real trouble.”
Ali’s Romeo and Juliet—which begins performances in late May and runs through June—will tell the story we all know, but set in a Verona located along the U.S.–Mexico border. He points out that Shakespeare never specifies what started the families’ feud, “just that it’s violent.” While he wanted a production that spoke to our current moment, Ali knew a racial or partisan us-versus-them interpretation would be too obvious and boring. So his Romeo comes from a Spanish-speaking immigrant home, while Juliet is an all-American mixed-race teen, and both live on the same side of the wall. Ali sees his lovers as the human cost of the damage caused by adults who have lost sight of what matters. “The pressure on the love story is the violence of the world around them,” Ali notes.
The cast didn’t know the full scope of their director’s plans when they signed on to the production, which features diverse designs reflecting the cultural variety of the 1,200-mile border. “Tijuana is very different from San Jose,” comments Ali, who embarked on a research trip to explore the region.Before rehearsals began, the team took a research trip along border towns. A tall fence separates the Delacorte’s 72-foot stage from the Central Park backdrop, and on the other side, giant statues of the Virgin of Guadalupe and La Catrina—a classic Día de Muertos skeleton—loom overhead. Closer to the audience, there’s a graveyard where immigration officers move around. “We’re creating something inspired by this environment and culture—a heightened, fantastical place that feels a bit futuristic,” says Ali. He and costume designer Oana Botez have drawn ideas from near-future science fiction stories. “What the ensemble will wear will feel almost like it’s from another planet.”…WOULD SMELL AS SWEET
Hernández wears an Amiri jacket and shirt, with Polo Ralph Lauren jeans.
The actor, known simply as LaChanze, plays Lady Capulet. She tells me that even though she wasn’t aware of the approach, she was eager to take on the role. Last seen in the Broadway premiere of Trouble in Mind (2021), she shifted to producing but ended her five-year break from the stage to join Romeo and Juliet. She had never done Shakespeare before, but as a mother of two, she deeply connected with the character’s maternal complexity: “Being a mom, knowing that your children have their own minds and will do whatever they want,” she says.
This Lady Capulet is the matriarch of a conservative family, living in a place “where speaking Spanish can be violent and punishable,” Ali says. In this production, the Hispanic Romeo can only speak his native language at home and is scolded by his cousin Benvolio for doing so anywhere else. Juliet learns Spanish from a household servant, Pedro (a minor character, Peter, in the original), and the language becomes the lovers’ secret code. The two find comfort in their connection.
Ali has developed a pattern of using multiple languages in his productions. His bilingual audio play Romeo y Julieta, released as a podcast during the pandemic, starred Nyong’o and Juan Castano. Now, Ali admits, that approach “didn’t say anything conceptual about the story.” But he refined the idea for his refugee-crisis-inspired production of Twelfth Night last year, where the private use of Swahili connected certain characters as they navigated a foreign land.
Ali understands that Shakespeare’s brilliance lies in how adaptable his works are. “Why do we keep coming back to these characters whose fates we already know?” Ali asks. He remembers watching Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet in a Nairobi cinema, with the young Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes gazing at each other through a fish tank. “You don’t need text when you have such a strong visual,” he says. Ali calls West Side Story, the 1957 musical set among rival New York gangs, the piece’s “most glorious adaptation and translation”—recognizable without copying every detail. He shares a passion with Aikens for the haunting score of Franco Zeffirelli’s faithful 1968 film.
“Even at her young age, she’s unsatisfied,” Aikens says. The actor’s eyes roll up in gentle empathy. “Part of her is grieving that she hasn’t yet been able to live or decide what she wants, and then she meets Romeo and, finally, it’s like she can survive through this love.” The two are growing up in a dangerous world, and Aikens, while proud of her achievement, sees her casting as almost “a new kind of stunt—we’re so used to seeing celebrities and people with established careers in these roles.” She says she’ll have to work a little to believe she didn’t trick someone into giving her the part.
“Right, right,” Hernández says, gently stopping this line of thought. “I think what’s great, at least what helps me, is thinking I’m not alone. We’re in this together.”
In this story: hair, Edward Lampley; makeup, Mark Carrasquillo; tailor, Tae Yoshida for Carol Ai Studio Tailors. Produced by Boom Productions Inc.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs about a bold new version of Romeo and Juliet set along the USMexico border
General Concept
1 Wait Romeo and Juliet on the border How does that work
Its a modern retelling Instead of the Montagues and Capulets the two families are from different sides of the borderone a wealthy American family the other a Mexican family facing deportation or immigration issues
2 Is it still in Shakespeares old English
Probably not Most modern adaptations use contemporary dialogue The language would likely be a mix of English and Spanish to reflect the setting keeping the passion and drama but making it feel real and urgent
3 Why set it on the USMexico border Whats the point
The border is a perfect metaphor for the original plays themes of division forbidden love and tragic misunderstandings It makes the ancient grudge feel incredibly current turning a family feud into a political and social wall
4 Is this meant to be political or just a love story
Its both The love story is the heart but the political reality of the borderimmigration law border patrol family separationcreates the conflict that makes the romance so dangerous and tragic
Characters Plot
5 Who is Romeo and who is Juliet in this version
One is likely the child of a US Border Patrol agent or a wealthy American rancher The other is the child of an undocumented immigrant family or a Mexican family living just across the fence
6 Who are the Mercutio and Tybalt figures
Mercutio could be a cynical friend who works with a humanitarian aid group or a border journalist Tybalt might be a hotheaded Border Patrol officer or a member of a vigilante border watch group
7 How does the famous balcony scene work
Instead of a balcony it could be a conversation across the border fence itself They might talk through the mesh or Juliet is on the US side and Romeo is on the Mexican side physically separated by the barrier
8 Does the ending change Is there still a death
The tragic ending is likely preserved The