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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm Vincent Cunningham, a staff writer for The New Yorker.

There have been at least 37 different productions of Romeo and Juliet on Broadway.

Not to mention countless high school productions.

Maybe you were in one.

I don't know.

But this new one by the director, Sam Gold, is kind of a dark, clubby, gen Z, Romeo and Juliet.

It's as if the teens from Euphoria decided that they had to do Shakespeare, and this is what they came up with.

The two stars are Rachel Ziegler, who you probably know from the latest movie version of Westside

Story, and Kit Connor, who's from the teen Netflix hit Heartstopper.

I wanted to talk to Sam Gold, partly just because I really admire his work, but also because I always have this question when someone does Romeo and Juliet.

And the question is, why now? Gold has famously directed five of Shakespeare's great tragedies. And it seems that he's kind of working through something about Shakespeare in public in front of all of us.

So I wanted to understand why Romeo and Juliet, why now, and how he came up with this totally interesting, totally bonkers production.

How does Sam Gold find his way into the middle of this mess?

Like, what makes you decide to do Romeo and Juliet now? I want to think that in this moment, after the pandemic, and after people have had enough years, like, completely addicted to their phones,

that young people are starting to really crave theater. I just was filled with the desire

to make something for young people. And I could see, you know, it was the spring and I was

seeing November 5th coming, you know, we have this election. What if I tried to open a play

around the election that was going to sort of put a fire under young people about what's really,

really hard about life right now.

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