Cupid has a confidence problem. In the published premise of Andrew Rincón’s I Wanna Fuck Like Romeo and Juliet, she abandons her wings and her faith in love; Saint Valentine tries to restore her spirits by reuniting two mortals. This essay reads the publisher’s synopsis and character notes, rather than a performance or the complete script.
The arrangement reverses a familiar romantic convenience. A god ordinarily supplies certainty about feelings that mortals cannot understand. Here, the deity needs convincing too. Alejandro and Benny’s breakup becomes part of a larger crisis without becoming less personal: someone else’s grand plan still has to contend with two people who have reasons to withdraw.
Concord identifies Benny as a Black queer man and Alejandro as a Latinx queer man. Its notes describe Benny deflecting difficult questions through flamboyance, while Alejandro avoids situations that might hurt him. These are different defenses. Put beside Cupid’s disillusionment, they suggest an appealing comic problem: people who need intimacy can become practiced at preventing it. Valentine’s persistence might help, but his confidence cannot itself settle what either lover owes the other.
Rincón’s author profile places fantasy and Latine mythology within the queer Colombian-American writer’s practice. The character notes give that mixture a practical dimension: both Cupid and Alejandro speak Spanish and English, and the offstage Poet’s lines may be performed by one actor or divided among several. These are choices a company has to make audible. A divine voice need not belong to a single body, and the mortal and celestial characters need not occupy separate linguistic worlds. That flexibility suggests a useful question for a production: who sounds authoritative, and how does the answer change when the voice moves?
The title’s invocation of Shakespeare makes that problem deliberately outsized. It invites the language of overwhelming passion into a story whose catalog setting includes Hackensack, New Jersey. The contrast leaves room for a romance measured in awkward conversations as well as cosmic disturbance. Whether the play realizes that possibility depends on its writing and performance; the premise offers a reason to seek them out.
59E59’s production archive records New Light Theater Project’s run from October 20 to November 5, 2022, directed by Jesse Jou. The venue described its subject as queer love of color. That specificity matters to this invitation: myth does not require its lovers to become interchangeable. The interesting promise is that even Cupid’s authority must answer to the particular people she is supposed to understand.
See the playwright conversation in Concord Theatricals’ media section.