ROMEO & JULIET was my MFA Production Design Thesis with UCLA. This adaptation has the bones of a familiar tale as well as the bones of the Western genre in cinema, but ultimately tells a new story with old roots. Based on my research of people we’d now consider to be trans in our American history - particularly through newspaper articles about Harry Allen from the Pacific Northwest - I’ve made Romeo to be a transmasculine character misunderstood by the town and the press, but understood by those who matter most: Juliet, his immediate and chosen family, and the viewers.

Familiar tragedies strike alongside new losses and discoveries of self and of others, but the newspapers that frame Romeo for every wrongdoing ultimately allow for an alternative ending for both Romeo and Juliet and the real queer figures they represent: where the couple would originally perish to double suicide, they now have a chance at life. Juliet does wake up as Romeo grieves her "death," and the two have just enough time to switch clothes and escape unnoticed as the local pastor covers up their deaths, spurring the papers to write an article about their deaths and yet another tragedy happening because of the "vagrant" that is Romeo Montague. With the town believing that events have unfolded just as they have in the original play, there is no reason for them to go looking for Romeo & Juliet, and so they are able to do as protagonists often due in the Western genre: they can travel West in pursuit of a new, free life.