Interview with Liz Wessel, co-founder of Joshua Tree Shakespeare Company and director of “Romeo & Juliet: A Mojave Reimagining”
Theatre 29’s 2026-27 mainstage season begins with a new take on a classic work, William Shakeseare’s “Romeo & Juliet: A Mojave Reimagining” in association with Joshua Tree Shakespeare Company, plays a limited two weekend run, October 9 – 18. I got a chance to talk with the director of the reimagined play, Liz Wessel.
During that interview, when asked about her background, Ms Wessel said, “I was a misfit theater kid in high school, just like many of us, and I had my first experience with Romeo and Juliet when my freshman English teacher showed us Franco Zeffirelli’s film, and I promptly fell in love with the actor playing Romeo, and promptly fell in love with the actress playing Juliet, and hence the love affair with Shakespeare began. I did my undergrad at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, home of the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, and I had the opportunity to study Shakespeare as an actor and to witness the power that this festival had to bring an entire community together as an event every summer in a small town.”
When asked about how the Joshua Tree Shakespeare Company came about, “Brian Hennessy and I met working on a beautiful production of King Lear, which unfortunately never saw the light of day, and he and I had similar stories relating to Shakespeare. His undergrad was home to another Shakespeare festival at Winedale, Texas, and we had many conversations about how cool it would be to bring something like this into our own community. And one day he just said, let’s do this, and the next thing you know, the paperwork was being filed, and we were Joshua Tree Shakespeare Company. It happened really fast. Ani Crochet, who is our brilliant third board member, is a friend from my shop. She’s a smart, savvy lady who loves Shakespeare, and when we were meeting, she came right out and said, if you want to get people to see Shakespeare, you got to trick them, and we loved that.”
When asked what she hopes audiences will get from this incarnation of the story,”I’m telling people to set aside everything they think they know about the story of Romeo and Juliet and prepare to have a new experience with it. Our reimagining is set right here, right now, in a fictional small town in the desert called Mojave, and our Romeo and Juliet are not teenagers. They’re adults with a rich and painful history, full-time careers running businesses, scars from disappointing love relationships, real people with real problems. Anger and jealousy, rage, obsession, love. I mean, that’s the genius of the Bard. All of that still translates today. Come see the show. It’s going to be an adventure.”
Tickets for “Romeo & Juliet: A Mojave Reimagining” are available at theatre29.org.
