Proximity Theatre Take On Romeo & Juliet

On a Friday afternoon at the height of summer, a group of teenagers gather in a church hall. Outside it’s the perfect Santa Barbara day: 70 degrees and sunny, a pleasant breeze stirring the branches of the palms. These kids hardly notice. They’ve got the curtains drawn. In bare feet and grey athletic clothes, they greet one another with hugs and murmurs, punctuated with squeals of laughter. Then, without speaking, they form a circle at the center of the room, close their eyes, and breathe, inhaling and exhaling in unison as if they were one body. This is not your average summer camp. This is Proximity Theatre Company, and they mean business.

The company is the creation of three Tisch School of the Arts graduates Kyra Lehman, Karina Richardson, and Ken Urbina. Back in 2007, their vision was to bring cutting-edge physical theater to the young people of S.B. and to work rigorously to produce inventive, exciting productions unlike anything this community had seen before. They set to work, putting participants through a rigorous program of reflective writing, camping trips, sweat lodges, and long hours of rehearsal five days a week. Their early shows met with success, but with last year’s production of Richardson’s original play The Marvellous Story of Shandy Wilkes, they set their own bar even higher, wowing audiences with startlingly direct storytelling and dynamic physicality. This year, the three directors have sprung for a new challenge: taking on the greatest love story of all time: Romeo and Juliet, which Lehman acknowledges is an intimidating choice.

“I’ve always been in love with love stories, and this story in particular, but it scared me,” she said. “There’s just so much expectation surrounding it.” Yet it’s written into the company’s mission to take bold risks, so Lehman figured they should go for it. As she put it, “When you’re really drawn to something and it freaks you out, it’s probably something you should do.”