In ART's 'Romeo and Juliet,' rage consumes the romance

CAMBRIDGE -- Romeo, Romeo, why the hell are you a Montague, Romeo?

That isn't what the American Repertory Theatre's Juliet, Annika Boras, says in the balcony scene, but she might as well, considering the way she spews out the soliloquy. Boras still delivers all the wherefores and wilts, but in this days-of-rage production, the Shakespearean language is more expectorated than elucidated.

This is less ''Romeo and Juliet" than ''Sid & Nancy" or ''Kurt & Courtney." Romantic love is impossible, even for a nanosecond, in a world corrupted by internecine violence and parental malfeasance. The best one can hope for is a glimmer of light through yonder window, knowing even that glimmer will be extinguished before too long.

Under Israeli director Gadi Roll, the epic cast delivers this unrelentingly bleak message while marching across a thick band of sand that runs the length of the Loeb Drama Center stage, with some seating in back of the action instead of to the sides. The Montagues and Capulets are rival posses, as they were in Baz Luhrmann's hyperventilating Hollywood version, ''William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet."

Roll makes Luhrmann look reverential. Boras's Juliet and Mickey Solis's Romeo don't seem particularly interested in breaking away from the violence around them; they would as soon pull out a blade themselves.

In theory, there's nothing wrong with any of this. Great directors often find exciting new ways of bending Shakespeare -- last summer's great ''Macbeth" by Max Stafford-Clark and his Out of Joint company in Holyoke, which transformed Scotland into an African dictatorship, comes to mind.

But here Shakespeare is bent beyond recognition, partly by Roll's insistence on banishing any semblance of beauty, hope, or, indeed, humanity from the play and partly by the inability of most of the young actors to walk a ''Pulp Fiction"-style walk and chew Elizabethan gum at the same time.

The exceptions are the veterans, particularly Thomas Derrah and Will LeBow, who invest their Friar Laurence and Capulet, respectively, with all the fury that Roll seems to be looking for without sacrificing any of the emotional force in the verse. Derrah makes Laurence into as power-driven and corrupt a force as the other adults, and LeBow's frustrations at being the ineffectual husband of a sex-starved, alcoholic, desperate housewife come pouring out in his rage at Juliet.

This is not the story, though, of a priest and a parent but of two lovers. There's more romantic and sexual tension between Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote and Catherine Keener as Harper Lee in ''Capote" than there is between this affectless Romeo and Juliet. Boras and Solis both look right -- she as if she just stepped out of an ''OC" audition, he like he's going clubbing. Boras also has a nice delivery when she's not being directed to recite her lines as if she were at a speed-dating gathering or when she's not doing ''Run Lola Run" aerobics from one end of the stage to the other.

But Solis, who was drafted when the original Romeo took off (sometimes there is wisdom in flight) gets by more on attitude than acting (as do most members of Mercutio's and Tybalt's entourages). He was excellent in last year's ''Desire Under the Elms," and perhaps he works better with director Janos Szasz, who was originally slated to direct ''Romeo" here.

Szasz was after something similar in ''Desire" -- an expressionistic landscape where there was little joy in love and more than a bit of violence in sex. But he didn't bend Eugene O'Neill to his will the way Roll does with Shakespeare.

Riccardo Hernandez, who also designed ''Desire," provides an equally desolate lust-among-the-ruins look here, but the giant sandbox grows increasingly dull over three hours. DM Wood's variety of lights, which descend from on high or are brought in by the characters, brings some sense of style to the proceedings, along with Kasia Maimone's smart and sexy costumes.

The grating that frames the sand suggests a prison and recalls the Smashing Pumpkins lyric, ''Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage." In fact, Roll's musical downloads include everything from James Brown to baroque and electronica.

But in trying to link the contemporary sense of despair to Shakespeare's more forgiving depiction of Elizabethan woe, the director does not connect the dots in a satisfactory way. Past ART productions have found common ground between Anton Chekhov and Samuel Beckett, but Shakespeare and Edward Bond or Sarah Kane are not soulmates.

Or, if they are, Roll isn't the right matchmaker.

Ed Siegel can be reached at siegel@globe.com.