That is one crazy statement, right! I will explain. Last night, I was watching the movie In the Heat of the Night. For those who don’t know the movie the setting is Sparta, Mississippi in the 1960’s. A black police detective from Philadelphia is pulled into the investigation and is entangled in the racial hazards of the segregated South, along with the murder investigation. It was the Best Picture and Rod Steiger, who player the sheriff won the Oscar for Best Actor. Watching the movie that was made in 1967, during a period in which I was witness to rioting going on a few blocks below me from my apartment in the City of Oakland, and knowing what watching that movie was like then and watching it 50 years later and to know what it is like to see it as a reflection on a period so long and yet so short time ago, it made realize that no one has really seen Romeo and Juliet and understood it completely since the time it was written.
It goes back to what my first History professor at UTEP taught me, and what I always tried to instill in my students. It is the recognition that we can not judge the past from the present, as in order to understand what happened you have to know and understand the context in which it happened.
So in order to get a little feeling of what In the Heat of the Night was like seeing in a theater in 1967, even lectures in history of that time could never recreate the same tensions, same exposed nerves, same passions and so on, is impossible to do. The story lines for Romeo and Juliet and In the Heat of the Night are standards and often retold in many variations. But, the only time In the Heat of the Night impacted the audience as it did when Sheriff Gillespie, asks the black detective what they call him up north in Philadelphia, spitting a racial slur? The detective snarls back, ” They call me, Mister Tibbs.”
Knowing that, it is impossible to watch a production of Romeo and Juliet today and have anything close to the same experience the audiences had at Stratford-on-Avon.
Perhaps a little something to keep in mind for a number of reasons.