Staging a Love as Boundless as the Sea: Meet Romeo + Juliet’s Intimacy Director

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has been called the greatest love story in all literature, a tale of erotic awakening whose 400-year-old poetry pulses in its evocation of intense, uncompromising desire.

But in the latest version of the play on Broadway, the doomed lovers have received a little guidance in the bedroom.

“When actors have agency and consent, you can create really powerful physical stories of intimacy and sex,” said Claire Warden, the show’s intimacy director.

Romeo + Juliet is the first production where the director Sam Gold has enlisted the input of an intimacy director, and Warden’s contributions are in evidence pretty much from the get-go. During the opening brawl between the Montagues and the Capulets—“Young people smashing their bodies together, hands grasping and gripping” in Warden’s description—two rival gang members, lost in the heat of the moment, come together in a kiss. The fighting grinds to a confused halt around them. “They push off and they’re like, ‘Now what? Do we f**k? Or do we fight?’” After a beat, the melee resumes. Love and violence, sex and death are in dangerous proximity in the play.

As Warden explained, a fleeting, erotically charged moment like this is the result of thoughtful choreography and collaboration between Warden, Gold, violence director Drew Leary and the actors. “Before intimacy direction existed, there would be so much talk about all of the other elements of the show,” said Warden. “And then you’d get to the love scenes and they’d go, ‘Just go for it.’”

Warden has a go-to analogy to explain her role in the rehearsal room. “It can be overwhelming when you have no idea where the bottom of the sea is. But in a pool, you know where the deep end is. You know where the shallow end is. You can get out when you want to.”

She added, “You can play harder and braver when there’s containers in place. You can and will take so many more acceptable risks in art—which is what often makes great art.”

Warden draws on considerable training and expertise as an actor (she herself has performed in Romeo and Juliet four times) and stage combat training as well as her experience in “trauma work”: guiding actors through potentially triggering scenes. In addition to directing scenes of intimacy in Gossip Girl and Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, she was the very first intimacy director to work on Broadway, working with Michael Shannon and Audra McDonald on Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.

For Shannon and McDonald, working with an intimacy director on a play was a novelty and an adjustment. By contrast, Warden said, the young cast of Romeo + Juliet is extremely “consent aware” and appreciative of the need for intimacy direction. But Warden has also noticed that the rise of cancel culture has led to a tentativeness around touch. “There is more fear around doing it wrong because the social consequences are dire. There’s a shyness around contact.”

I asked Warden to walk me through how one of Romeo + Juliet’s more sensuous scenes came together. There’s much more to it, she explained, than “left hand goes here”—or offering an actor a mint and asking if they’re OK. It takes planning, care, diplomacy and weeks’ worth of built trust.

Take the scene in Juliet’s bedroom the morning after the lovers’ first night together. (“Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day: It was the nightingale, and not the lark, that pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear.”)

Early in the rehearsal period, Warden spoke with this production’s Romeo and Juliet, Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler, individually—in fact, she spoke with all the cast members—about their personal needs and boundaries. She asked questions like, What’s on the table? What’s not on the table? What level of undress works for you? Where on your body is it OK to be touched? A key focus was making them feel supported and comfortable enough to speak up about their needs, especially when something doesn’t feel right.

It’s also useful to “know what we can play with,” said Warden, with the implicit understanding that “we can always adjust in the room if circumstances change: ‘Wait a minute, I thought I’d be OK with that. I’m not.’ Or, ‘Actually, I said no to that, but that feels good now.’”

After their separate conversations, Zegler and Connor came together to communicate their needs and boundaries with each other. It’s OK if it’s awkward. The point is that actors learn how to listen to each other’s bodies—listening with their bodies—and organically build trust. In theater and film, said Warden, there used to be an assumption that trust between performers exists automatically. There’s no such assumption here. As actors learn how to see and support each other as full human beings, Warden explained, they’re better equipped to engage in physically demanding moments together—not just scenes of intimacy but scenes of choreographed violence too.

The actors are ready to contemplate the text. Are there moments where it’s clear some contact happens that we want to honor? What’s the feeling? What’s the tone? In the scene in question, Romeo and Juliet have spent much of the night exploring each other’s bodies. “They have had sex. Probably a couple of times. He was supposed to be gone by midnight. It’s like five AM.”

When Zegler and Connor feel ready to run the scene—Yes, I know my body can go there— the actors check in with themselves and each other, a ritual acknowledgment of each other’s humanity. “We call it ‘tapping in.’ Before the start of every scene, you see each other, you take a breath together, you do a high ten. It's that little ritual of telling your body, ‘We are going to work.’” (Separating work and real life in this way can help prevent that occupational hazard of the dramatic arts: the showmance.)

In the scene, Juliet teases and implores Romeo to linger in bed a while longer. Warden makes a suggestion to Zegler. “How much can you do to make him stay?” So far in the relationship, Romeo and Juliet have traded light caresses, grazed cheeks, run their fingers through each other’s hair. Now, Warden suggests “changing the landscape of touch to chest, hips, thighs.” Skin-to-skin contact is more heated now. “Let’s have a little more tension in the hand. We are grabbing. We are more confident with each other’s bodies.”

Things develop from there, with all parties making suggestions. “We let them play,” said Warden. “I'll have a thought and Sam will have a thought and they'll have a thought. We examine it, pull it apart, go back and revisit. We just keep building it together.”

And whatever Juliet (Zegler) does to try to tempt Romeo (Connor) to stay, it works. “Let me be ta'en,” he sighs, surrendering. “Let me be put to death.”

Zegler and Connor were cast without the benefit of a chemistry test. Fortunately, a real connection has developed. “They have created such a beautiful, pure friendship as they’ve worked together. They’re both so adorable and funny and heartbreaking and cute as all f**k and sexy when they need to be.” Warden adds, “They really fully embody it and believe in the scene when they’re doing it,” but afterwards, they’re able to “put it down and go home. And pick it up tomorrow.”

Later this Broadway season, Warden will serve as intimacy director on Othello, starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllennhaal. “A very, very different meditation on what love and sex is, and how it can be used.” In the meantime, she’s inspired by how up-for-it the Romeo + Juliet cast is. “There's a lot of queer joy, a lot of everybody loving on everyone else,” she said. As Warden explains, physical contact can be as much about succor and soothing as it is about sexuality and sense and pleasure. It’s not all explicitly sexual. “We are humans,” she said. “We need to be touched and we need to touch.”