Abrams, Jeremy
Description
"Wherefore art - I?"
That’s the question Shakespeare’s Juliet asks when she is reanimated 600 years after her tragic death in Verona, only to find he
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rself occupying the body of Denny’s waitress Remy Martin.
Wherefore art she? She’s serving pancakes to construction workers in Charlotte, North Carolina, and none too happy about it. And Remy isn’t happy either, now that she has to take turns in controlling her own body with a precocious Renaissance teenager who speaks in iambic pentameter.
After Juliet asks every man she meets if he is her Romeo, to no avail, she attends a performance of her own play, where she winds up on stage portraying - herself.
In We'll Always Have Verona, which begins with this performance, Remy is given the chance to review her own life – and marriage – from the perspective of Romeo & Juliet. Each scene conjures a parallel to her own life; the lovers' poetic first meeting is interspersed with her conversation with her future husband when he first asked her out; Mercutio's Queen Mab speech reflects a bittersweet seduction that befell her best friend Belle; the lovers' parting at daybreak reminds her of the day her husband left on a military deployment…
In the process, Remy experiences what she, and we, look like through the eyes of Western literature's foremost romantic heroine.
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