WALTER SCHLINGER’S ROMEO AND JULIET
Written & Performed by Sean Gordon; Directed by Dixie O’Connell
Presented by Glow-Worm Theatre Company, Brooklyn
Presented by the New York City Fringe Festival
The Rat NYC I 68-117 Jay Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Fri April 3 at 9:50pm, Sat April 11 at 8:40pm, Mon April 13 at 6:30pm, Sun April 19 at 2:00pm
There persists, in our aggressively utilitarian age, a low, nagging suspicion that the humanities—those unruly disciplines devoted to literature, philosophy, and the slow burn of thought—are, if not obsolete, then at least indulgent. What, after all, is the use of reading Romeo and Juliet in a world that prizes immediacy, monetization, and measurable outcomes? One answer arrives, gently but insistently, in Walter Schlinger’s Romeo and Juliet, a new solo work written and performed by Sean Gordon, and presented under the auspices of the 2026 NYC Fringe Festival. The production does not so much defend the humanities as enact them—turning the stage into a site of inquiry, where literature becomes less an artifact to be admired than a tool with which to think, to feel, and, crucially, to endure.
Walter Schlinger (Gordon), a recent graduate and would-be essayist, occupies a kind of emotional vestibule: he has exited the dense, sustaining world of the liberal arts college—its late-night arguments, its provisional certainties, its small, fervent republic of minds—but has not yet secured entry into the professional literary sphere he longs to join. He is, in other words, suspended, and Gordon’s performance locates, with unnerving precision, the peculiar ache of that suspension.
Walter presents what is ostensibly a GoFundMe-supported lecture version of his undergraduate thesis on Romeo and Juliet. The talk is neatly partitioned into three movements—Youth, Love, Fate—categories that gesture toward order but prove, as the evening unfolds, increasingly porous. Like so many of his literary forebears, Walter is a figure of thwarted ambition: a young man with a formidable intellect and no clear foothold, caught between aspiration and inertia. He reveres Joan Didion and Susan Sontag with equal fervor, yet finds himself unable to breach the invisible membrane separating the unpublished from the published. His thesis—praised by a mentor, rejected by the wider world—has become a kind of palimpsest, layered with revisions, each one an attempt to close the gap between what he means and what he manages to say.
The conceit of the lecture, however, is only the scaffolding. Walter begins by insisting, almost apologetically, that he is not a performer, a claim underscored by his tentative dependence on note cards, which he consults, fumbles, and, eventually, abandons. The gesture is small but telling: as the cards fall away, so too does the illusion of control. The talk, like a life, veers off-script. What emerges is not a polished argument but a lived process—thought in motion, self-interrogation made visible.
Under the attentive direction of Dixie O'Connell, Gordon crafts a portrait of Walter that is both minutely specific and quietly expansive. Anxiety, ambition, resentment, and hope flicker across his face in quick succession, never settling into a single, stable emotion. He is, at once, self-aware and self-deluding, earnest and faintly absurd. The performance resists the easy consolations of irony; instead, it allows Walter the dignity of his contradictions.
Throughout, fragments of Romeo and Juliet surface—not as decorative quotations but as working material, texts to be handled, tested, and, at times, resisted. These are interwoven with the prose cadences of Didion and Sontag, forming a dense intertextual fabric that mirrors Walter’s own interior life. Even his personal history begins to read like a text among texts, subject to interpretation, revision, and doubt. Projections—slides that Walter clicks through with varying degrees of confidence—lend the proceedings a wryly familiar academic texture, including one particularly recognizable moment in which several slides are hurriedly skipped, as if clarity might be achieved through acceleration.
What the piece ultimately proposes—though never programmatically—is that the relationship to art can be, in its way, perilous. To invest one’s identity so fully in the act of thinking and making is to court disappointment, even despair. And yet, the production insists, art remains one of the few reliable instruments we possess for making sense of that disappointment. If Walter’s devotion to literature edges, at moments, toward the obsessive, it is also what enables him to persist.
For the audience, the experience is less cautionary tale than quiet affirmation. Walter Schlinger’s Romeo and Juliet becomes, paradoxically, the very thing Walter fears he cannot achieve: a work that connects, that communicates, that transforms private uncertainty into shared recognition. In an era eager to quantify value, the production offers something more elusive but no less essential—a reminder that the humanities do not justify themselves through utility, but through their capacity to enlarge the space of human thought and feeling. Someone should suggest that to an idiot that insists an arts center should be named for him despite his lack of knowledge of, or respect for, the arts. Hmmmmmmm…
Click HERE for tickets.
Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on April 8, 2026. All rights reserved.
