Terndrup and Kendall immediately win over the audience with their self-introductions in hesitant French. Some twenty years after the events of Shakespeare’s tragedy, having unsuccessfully tried couples therapy to resolve their domestic disputes and sexual difficulties, Romeo and Juliet turn to a kind of public psychodrama, reenacting scenes from their shared past, beginning in two armchairs suggestive of a psychoanalyst’s consulting room. There is no fourth wall to break as it was never there in the first place. Juliet even reminds Romeo, “These people paid for their tickets!”

The first memory they reenact is their encounter at a party: it was love at first sight. Throughout the piece, dance reveals what words cannot, and this first becomes apparent when Romeo, imaginatively dressed as Darth Vader, approaches Juliet, whom he mistook for a golden chicken (she insists she was a phoenix), to the sound of the Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).” His solo, with its circular movements and repeated forward thrusts of the hips, resembles the courtship dance of a bird: he slides forward, pulls back, then advances again, in a play of attraction and repulsion that will come to define their relationship.

Prokofiev’s famous “Dance of the Knights,” usually associated with the ceremonial display of the Capulets’ power, here accompanies a passionate duet under red lighting. The choreography is comical in its exaggerated solemnity, at once combative and fluid, recalling Kenneth MacMillan’s pas de deux in both movement and emotional intensity. Exhausted, the couple collapse into the armchairs. The reenactment of the crypt scene is equally parodic: Juliet pretends to succumb to the potion, repeatedly falling to the floor in exaggerated mock faints. Another duet unfolds to Des’ree’s “Kissing You,” the sentimental theme from Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet: Romeo clumsily drags the supposedly dead Juliet around like a sack of potatoes. The effort is considerable, much as in traditional ballet versions, but here she really is heavy, limp and uncooperative. After striking a series of theatrical poses that draw amused applause, he finally gives up and sits down, overcome by back pain.