Romeo and Juliet

A community consumed with a grudge because of two families. Two fathers fighting against each other so doggedly that they lose what is most important, their only children, their legacy. The design aesthetic of Steampunk for us mirrors the unlikely marriage of the Capulets and the Montages just as the mechanical seamlessly integrates with the Victorian style. The Steampunk Bible best describes its own essence: “Steampunk is funeral theater. It’s a pageant. A pageant selectively pumps some life into the parts of the past that can excite us, such as the dandified gear of aristocrats, peculiar brass gadgets, rather stilted personal relationships, and elaborate and slightly kinky underwear. Pageants represent the aspects of the past that are dark, gloomy, ugly, foul, shameful, and catastrophic. But when you raise the dead they bring their baggage…. The past is a kind of future that has already happened.” This quote also illuminates what the Friar communicates to us about the past in the prologue. Tonight we “raise the dead” with “their baggage” so that we may consider the consequences of living unjustly. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has been told for hundreds of years. It reminds us of the cost of hatred and fear; what we love most. And it also reminds us that love is more powerful and can bring justice and reconciliation.