←Recommendations of MERCUTIO LOVES ROMEO LOVES JULIET LOVES

I was lucky enough to see the world premiere of this play at Boomerang. Gina Femia has written an achingly true, screamingly funny, delicately awkward, and emotionally resonant depiction of queer adolescent pain and desire. Centering three very different teenage girls involved with a Catholic high school production of Romeo and Juliet, Femia’s play finds these young people facing the same pangs of longing that Shakespeare articulated centuries ago. Brilliant work! I loved it!

Is there anything more Shakespearean in the tangled scope of its passion than the American high school experience? Well, yes - the American Cathlolic girls' school experience as endured by queer teenagers, and there's no better guide to this particular landscape than Gina Femia, as this marvelous three-hander amply demonstrates. A wise, passionate little gem.

Every moment in this play vibrates with an urgent momentum, with the heedlessness of youth and also with its paralyzing insecurities. The playwright knows how people talk and the play conveys how these people feel and the whole thing's so alive it almost demands to be staged.

Crushing, hilarious, beautiful, awkward, intelligibly tangled.
This play, like, IS the teenage years, especially the queer ones.
I can't express how much I love it. How glad I am to have read it, and OH GOD how much I would love to direct it (or just see it staged!).
Brava, Femia.

Reading this play felt like falling down the most glorious rabbit hole. Femia constructs the most compelling and effortless dialogue, and then turns around and takes readers' breath away with some gorgeous prose.

The thing that sings for me about this play is the authenticity—it is painfully genuine at times, depicting this trio of queer high schoolers in all their beautiful, cringeworthy glory. The result is a piece that's like a really beautiful trainwreck. You can see each character falling in love in tiny moments of bare naked honesty, and you must watch as the threads become tangled and complicated. It's just as inevitable as any Shakespearean tragedy, moving swiftly and efficiently toward the ending nobody wants. Still, I was so invested in these lives I couldn't look away. A fantastic play!

Premiere Stages, the professional Equity theatre in residence at Kean University, is pleased to recognize “Mercutio Loves Romeo Loves Juliet Loves” by Gina Femia as a Semi-Finalist for the 2023 Premiere Play Festival. “Mercutio Loves Romeo Loves Juliet Loves” rose through a competitive selection process conducted by Premiere staff and a panel of outside theatre professionals to become one of 40 Semi-Finalists out of 701 submissions. The panel was particularly impressed by the strong, poetic dialogue and the complex, authentically felt development of these three teens navigating their queerness. Our congratulations and thanks to Gina.

This is such a lovely, intimate triplet of a play that delicately explores the intersection of coming of age, queerness, and social expectations. The way the relationships between all three characters evolve slowly but surely feels organic keeps you reading with little moments of suspense and with their poignantly blossoming social and love connections. These characters speak with the "inelegance meets profundity" of real teens--Gina captures the impulsivity and deep yearning and thoughtfulness of the high school years. I'd so love to see this performed!