This week I saw live theater for the first time in ages. I used to have season tickets for the Broadway musical touring show series, and when I was in college I took a couple of theater electives that required you to go to all the theater department shows. But I dropped my season tickets when they started bringing around the same shows every year and when the only new shows were those that were musical versions of movies or “jukebox” musicals. It’s been decades since I’ve been to a non-musical play.

But I now live in a town with a real theater, and I’ve made friends who are really involved in it, so I got to go to the dress rehearsal for their production of Romeo and Juliet this week. The theater is a reproduction of the Blackfriars Theater, the one where Shakespeare’s company performed once they made it big, so it’s an indoor theater with actual seats, not like the Globe. They try to keep the experience close to what it was in Shakespeare’s time, so they don’t turn out the lights over the audience. Once the candles for the chandeliers were lit, they had to stay lit (though they use electric candles in the chandeliers here). That also means there are no lighting effects. There’s also no amplification — no microphones. The acoustics in the theater are really good, and it’s a fairly small space, so you can hear pretty well even without microphones.

Though it may be a really old-school theater, they did play with the setting, so this Romeo & Juliet was set in the early 2000s in America. They used American accents with the Shakespearean text and a very modern inflection. The clothes were rather stylized so didn’t look exactly like the way I remember the early 2000s, but there were elements that reflected that era. For instance, Juliet often wore a Juicy Couture-style velour track suit, but instead of it saying “Juicy” across the bottom, it said “Juliet.” In scenes where she was reading a book, she had Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (reminding us that she was a teenager). A lot of the guys wore letter jackets from Verona High, and they were hanging out at a Pizza Hut when one of the fights between the rival factions broke out.

It wasn’t a musical, but it did incorporate music. The whole cast does a few songs before the show and at the end of intermission, with some of them playing instruments, and the actors play music and sing where it fits into the play — like in this case at the party where Romeo and Juliet meet.

One thing I’d forgotten about theater was the weird sense of having to re-enter the real world after the show is over. For some weird reason, it’s stronger for me in a play than a movie, in spite of the movie being more immersive, where the lights are out and you’re seeing that whole world. I think maybe that’s actually the reason — you have to engage your own imagination so much when seeing a play that there’s more of a transition when you come back to the real world. In this case with such minimal staging, with no scenery and no sets or props other than things the actors interact with that are necessary for the scene, your imagination has to build the world for you. It takes a little time to dismantle that imaginary world you’ve been creating and come back to where you really are.

Fortunately, I had the walk across downtown with my friends to their house on the very edge of downtown to reorient myself before I drove home (I live within walking distance of the theater, but I wouldn’t want to make the walk alone late at night. I don’t think I’d be truly unsafe, but there’s a stretch of street that’s completely deserted late at night, and there are some really dark patches, so it’s common sense) so I didn’t have that entirely unreal feeling while driving.

My friends are recruiting me to be an usher at the theater, and my neighbor is the costume designer, so I may be going to the theater more often. They work in repertory, so there’s one cast for the season and the same people do multiple plays in rotation. This season they’re also doing Two Gentlemen of Verona, starting in a couple of weeks, and then there’s another play that isn’t Shakespeare. They seem to do a lot of shows based on Jane Austen’s works, as well as classic plays like The Importance of Being Earnest.