Review: With Patient Ears Attend "Walter Schlinger's Romeo and Juliet"

Walter Schlinger's Romeo and Juliet

Written and performed by Sean Gordon

Directed by Dixie O'Connell

Presented by Glow-Worm Theatre Company at UNDER St.Marks

94 St. Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC

August 4-16, 2024

Sean Gordon. Photo by Ezekiel Clare
Contemporary American society often questions the value of studying the humanities. One way to view Walter Schlinger's Romeo and Juliet, a new solo show from actor, writer, and co-founder of Glow-Worm Theatre Company Sean Gordon, is as an argument for precisely such study, a display of the kinds of conversations that the humanities can prompt us to have with ourselves (and one another) and of how literary texts such as the works of Shakespeare can function not merely objects of admiration but as tools with which to think. Walter Schlinger's Romeo and Juliet is currently part of FRIGID New York's 2024 Little Shakespeare Festival, the theme of which is "Camaraderie and Community," and the play's compassionate portrait of the artist as a young man working at a coffee shop shows the titular Walter suspended in a liminal space between one community that he has left behind and a second to which he has not yet gained the desired membership.
 
Walter Schlinger (Sean Gordon), who shares initials with the author of Romeo and Juliet, is making a GoFundMe-supported presentation of a version of his senior thesis on that particular Shakespeare play and the figure of the young artist. Walter's talk is divided into sections titled Youth, Love, and Fate, which roughly structure the play as well. As a character, Walter joins an extremely long line of struggling scholars and writers populating English-language literature. He has graduated from college, losing what he rightly points out as the underappreciated freedom of a community of passionate, inquisitive peers offered by a liberal arts college, as well as the guidance of his faculty mentor. At the same time, and as someone who admires essayists such as Joan Didion and Susan Sontag as much as he admires Shakespeare's tragedy of star-cross'd lovers, he has so far been unable to infiltrate the ranks of professional writers. Despite his mentor's encouraging reaction, his thesis has met with only rejections from publishers, despite his extensive and ongoing revisions (writers of all varieties will be familiar with some version of this experience, and we can even see some of the long work of revision in the program's description of how the play's speaker/s evolved). Taking to heart his mentor's feedback that the language of his thesis was distancing, Walter's talk acts as a sort of last-ditch attempt to put his work, and himself, before an audience. Walter's presentation, however, like career plans, like life, ends up not quite sticking to the plan.
Sean Gordon. Photo by Ezekiel Clare
Walter specifies early that he is not any kind of performer, a declaration supported by his sometimes shaky reliance on note cards (discarded, increasingly and significantly, as time goes on). Gordon, though, proves himself a fantastic performer with his wonderfully understated but specific turn as Walter. In tandem with Dixie O'Connell's direction, Gordon puts before the audience a fully formed person in whom anxiety and frustration and ambition and hope intermingle as he works through the disjunction between what everyone, including culture and media, has told him it is like to be in one's twenties and his actual, often lonely and overwhelming, experience. Throughout, passages and performance choices from Romeo and Juliet (as well as quotations from a few essayists) aid Walter in processing his experiences, augmented by projected slides, designed by Reed Gordon (a moment when Walter skips through several slides will be amusingly familiar to anyone who has attended a similar talk in the real world). From Walter's intertextual web–and we here can include his own history and future as one of those texts–emerges the possibility that the relationship to one's art can in fact be toxic, but also that art, even for no obvious reward, can be a source of strength, hope, and joy. For the audience, Walter Schlinger's Romeo and Juliet is certainly the latter.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

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