[In the following review of Rob Barron's abridged 2001 stage adaptation of Romeo and Juliet at the Lucille Lortel Theater in New York City, Gates highlights the production's potential appeal to younger audiences.]

Benvolio wears camouflage pants, with one leg rolled up to his knee. The Capulets' illiterate male servant constantly listens to his Walkman. The Prince wears a headset. The young people of Verona act out basketball moves, whoop their hellos and practice their martial arts moves. A lot of hip-hop is happening in Theaterworks/U.S.A.'s well-acted, throbbingly high-energy production of Romeo and Juliet at the Lucille Lortel Theater. And when Juliet is told that Paris (a loser who, like the grown-ups, wears suits) wants to marry her, Juliet throws up.

None of this should come as much of a surprise. Theater producers and filmmakers have been trying for eons to make teenagers sit up and take notice that Shakespeare wrote about young people just like them. The last movie incarnation of Romeo and Juliet was Baz Luhrmann's 1996 modern-dress, Elizabethan-language version with Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes, Florida gas-station shootouts and a black Mercutio in drag. But that may already seem appallingly dated to audience members born in the mid-1980's.

Theaterworks is also going after young theatergoers by making all tickets for the play, which runs through July 18, free.

Like many dramatists, Rob Barron, who wrote and directed this intermissionless 90-minute adaptation, just wants to help adolescents see through the unfamiliar language all the way to the plot, whose basics have always been appealing to the young. Two good-looking teenagers whose families hate each other meet at a party, fall in love at first sight and secretly marry. Just after the wedding, the boy gets into trouble (street violence) and has to leave town if he knows what's good for him. The lovers have one night of passion, then part. When the girl's parents try to force her to marry another man, she fakes her own death with the help of a powerful drug. Thanks to the errors of the adults around them, both lovers end up dead in a misguided double suicide.

The Theaterworks production's cast doesn't always succeed in wringing the full meaning from Shakespeare's language, but the young lovers (Gene Farber and Kristin Sentman) are convincing and sympathetic.

Phillip Clark makes an amusingly blustery Capulet. And Susanne Marley is elegantly effective as Juliet's nurse, in comic moments (“I will take him down. Scurvy knave!”) as well as dramatic ones (the discovery of her young mistress's seemingly dead body).

The original music, by Marty Beller with David Driver, does its job: updating the emotions. Beowulf Boritt's set, dominated by a slanted wall of broken windows, is great-looking and surprisingly evocative as a wide range of settings (from the Capulets' home to Verona's mean streets).

In fact at the end of the scene in which Romeo kills Tybalt (played by a woman, incidentally) and the sound of police sirens fills the air, older theatergoers may swear they've just seen Tony stab Bernardo in West Side Story and that Officer Krupke is on his way. There's a circular kind of logic to that.