Romeo + Juliet, directed by acting professor Anne Thibault, will be having its first performance at 7:30 p.m. Thursday in the Theatre of the Doudna Fine Arts Center.

The first show has been sold out to 300 high school students. After Thursday, Romeo + Juliet will be open to students, faculty and other members of the community.

Thibault said the play takes place in a fictional world in the future, where children have been sent to a camp with strict rules, and the children have to secretly come up with ways to express what they are going through. They end up doing a secret production of Romeo and Juliet.

“The camp is instilling these values in them, as the parents in Rome and Juliet are, and give really strict gender norms,” Thibault said. “Boys and girls are not allowed to interact, and they really want to because they’re teenagers. So this expression of art is not well looked upon because they’re supposed to be training for the future.”

In retelling William Shakespeare’s classic love story, the children from the camp would be wandering out to the forest and using any objects they could find to reenact Romeo and Juliet.

While the children are in the forest they would be fighting with sticks or with parts of their camp uniforms.

“I really hated Romeo and Juliet in high school and it wasn’t until I got to college that I found a way in to make it interesting for me. Even now, a lot of productions of Shakespeare that I go to see don’t feel like they’re necessarily speaking to me,” Thibault said. “It was really important to me to take a look at this play, which we all feel like we know very well, but is actually more problematic and more interesting than what we think of it when encountering it for the first time.”

Thibault said she wanted to present the classic play through a contemporary lens, but she would still be keeping the original Shakespearian framework. She said it was important to perform, since it is the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death.

The love story between a 13-year-old girl and 15-year-old boy would remain, Thibault said, and while it might not be a grown-up love, the youthful passion would be present in the play.

“If you look at the parent-child interactions in this play they’re incredibly limited and there is a real divide from them. So if that’s happening there, in terms of a love story, would Romeo and Juliet have gone as far as they did if their parents hadn’t been so busy being embroiled in this age old battle with their families?” Thibault said.

In staying true to the play’s tragic framework, Thibault said she did not want to give away the ending, but said it would not be happy.

Thibault said the students are involved with acting in Shakespeare’s works because his plays are emotional and do not have subtext.

“Watching these kids who are coming from the regular pressures of every day life, to just bring their entire soul onto the stage has just been awesome, amazing and exciting,” Thibault said.

Show times will be at 7:30 p.m. from April 15 to April 23 and at 2 p.m. on April 24.

General admission for the concert is $12, Eastern employees and senior admission is $10 and student admissions are $5.

Abbey Whittington can be reached at 581-2812 or anwhittington@eiu.edu