“I don’t give in to the stars,” says Daniel Bravo Hernández.

“Me neither,” says Ra’Mya Latiah Aikens, “but it is such a good icebreaker.”

The leads of the Public Theater’s Romeo and Juliet, which will be staged in Central Park this summer for Shakespeare in the Park, aren’t talking about star-crossed lovers—exactly—but about astrology. We are sitting at a table in Cocina Consuelo, a buzzy Harlem restaurant run by a Dominican chef and her Mexican husband. It’s two weeks before rehearsals begin, and the colorful surroundings, with live music and boldly patterned tiles, offer a fitting backdrop for our discussion of this cross-cultural production, directed by Saheem Ali. Hernández, 24, smiles bashfully as I explain the restaurant’s backstory: The chef impulsively followed her friend on a trip back home to Mexico, where they fell in love; the friends-and-family supper club they then opened evolved into two brick-and-mortar establishments. A native of Inwood, some 50 blocks north, Hernández, too, is Mexican Dominican, right at home ordering a glass of hibiscus juice.

Hernández may not buy into horoscopes—but some stroke of good fortune has undeniably helped him. Growing up, he claims he “didn’t know New York was an acting hub.” He studied acting at SUNY Purchase, and after he graduated made his Broadway debut in the 2024 revival of Romeo and Juliet, led by Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler, as the servant Abraham and Friar John. Hernández continued to book gigs around the city while holding down a job at a gym near the Public; he was on his way to rehearsals for an Off Broadway show, lugging two 35-pound weights, when two of the Public’s casting directors spotted him. The next day there was an email in his inbox inviting him to audition as an understudy for Ali’s upcoming production in the park. He went in, “was exceptional,” remembers Ali, and booked the lead instead.

Around that same time, Aikens, 26, was feeling indifferent about her emerging career. She grew up in small-town Georgia, where singing was her first love. “But I was really shy,” she says, “so my family had to convince me to sing at church or anywhere.” Her high school choir director encouraged her to try musical theater—eventually she landed at New York University’s graduate drama program in 2022. She played Hermia in the Classical Theatre of Harlem’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“Juliet, if she were able to have a happy ending,” she says) and got a small part in One Night Only, a rom-com starring Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner that comes out later this year. But her mother passed away unexpectedly last December, and the grief dimmed any sense of celebration. When the audition for Juliet came in, she’d been reading Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell’s exploration of grief in Shakespeare’s life, and she found herself suddenly “looking forward to something again.” At her callback, Aikens read the scene where, potion in hand, Juliet wrestles with the prospect of death. She got the job on the spot.

Despite their relative youth, both actors are studied Shakespeare veterans (Hernández says one day he’d like to direct the lesser known King John; Aikens cites a 2023 production of Twelfth Night with Kara Young as pivotal) and have learned firsthand how immediate a centuries-old play can be when stripped of pretension. Hernández has performed with the Public’s Mobile Unit initiative, which mounts free productions across the city’s five boroughs, at parks, community centers, and correctional facilities, and Aikens has participated in a similar program. Shakespeare is “not a matter of doing it ‘properly,’ ” she says, “but doing it with as much of your heart as you can muster, and in that way it is absolutely for everybody.”

Somewhat surprisingly, this is only the fourth time in the 70-year history of Shakespeare in the Park that Romeo and Juliet has been staged. The last time was in 2007, when Oscar Isaac and Lauren Ambrose played the lovers. (The New York Times called the “red-haired and luminously pale” Ambrose “a Juliet truly to die for.”) Delacorte productions tend to accentuate a fresh approach—and there is an awareness, among this cast, that they want to exceed this expectation. “With most recent Shakespeare productions, it’s ‘We need this now more than ever,’ and I’m like, Do we?” asks Hernández. “Because then you watch the show, and what did it say? If you’re gonna do Shakespeare, have a take.”

Ali certainly has a new—and urgent—interpretation. In the first of a series of calls, the director is clear in his vision, but open to its evolution. His longtime friend Lupita Nyong’o tells me it’s one of his best qualities—his aptitude for “growing exponentially with every project.” Ali’s introduction to Shakespeare came a few years after his airline-pilot father took him to visit London from their home in Nairobi. Blown away by a West End production of Grease, he persuaded his high school to let him stage an adaptation (he was Danny Zuko, of course). This caught the attention of a local theater owner, who cast the 17-year-old Ali as Mercutio, opposite Nyong’o (then 14) as Juliet. Nyong’o recalls her scene partner’s magnetic qualities, as well as his brotherly protectiveness at their closing-night party. It was “the first time I’d ever been to a discotheque,” she says.

“We were Black and brown kids, and we spoke in our own dialects,” Ali says. “My introduction to Shakespeare involved me as an African, sounding like an African and being an African.” He was confused, then, when he moved to Boston to study theater at Northeastern in the late ’90s and found that Shakespeare productions were “all white people talking with a British accent.” Nyong’o, who grew up listening to her father reciting Shakespeare, similarly says she “learned to be intimidated” once she was exposed to the idea in college “that Shakespeare was this elitist thing that you have to reach for.”

Ali’s career took off when he began to alternate counter­cultural pieces like Hair with gigs for Boston’s Commonwealth Shakespeare Company. When he moved to New York, he began partnering with now renowned Black dramatists like Jocelyn Bioh and Donja R. Love. In 2020 he was appointed the Public Theater’s associate artistic and resident director and has used this position to develop new works by artists from marginalized communities. Ali, according to the Public’s longtime artistic director, Oskar Eustis, “has been a champion of young directors since the moment he arrived. Saheem has the perspective that if we don’t develop directors who both believe what we believe and who can handle stages like the Delacorte, we’re gonna be really in trouble.”

Ali’s Romeo and Juliet—which begins performances in late May and runs through June—will be the story we all know, but set in a Verona located along the United States–Mexico border. Shakespeare, he points out, never specifies what began the families’ feud, “just that it’s violent.” Though he wanted a production that spoke to our current moment, Ali knew a racial or partisan us-versus-them interpretation would be obvious and dull. So his Romeo comes from a Spanish-speaking immigrant home, while Juliet is an all-American mixed-race teen, and both live on the same side of the wall. Ali sees his lovers as the human collateral of the damage caused by adults who have lost the plot. “The pressure on the love story is the violence of the world around them,” Ali notes.

The cast didn’t know the full scope of their director’s plans when they signed on to the production, which features diverse designs evoking the cultural breadth of the 1,200-mile border. “Tijuana is very different from San Jose,” comments Ali, who embarked on a research trip along border towns before rehearsals. An imposing fence separates the Delacorte’s 72-foot stage from the Central Park backdrop, and giant statues of the Virgin of Guadalupe and La Catrina, an iconic Día de Muertos skeleton, loom on the other side. Closer to the audience, there is a graveyard traversed by roving immigration officers. “We’re creating something that is inspired by this environment and culture—a heightened, fantastical place that feels a little futuristic,” says Ali, who, alongside costumer Oana Botez, has taken cues from not-too-distant science fiction stories. “What the ensemble is going to be wearing will feel like it’s almost on a different planet.”

The mononymous actor LaChanze plays Lady Capulet and tells me that despite not being aware of the approach, she was eager to take on the role. Last seen in the Broadway premiere of Trouble in Mind (2021), she pivoted to producing, but ended her five-year hiatus from the stage to join Romeo and Juliet. She’d never done Shakespeare, but, as a mother of two, she connected deeply with the character’s maternal complexity: “being a mom, knowing that your children have their own mind and will do whatever they want to do,” she says.

This Lady Capulet is the matriarch of a conservative family, living in a place “where the act of speaking Spanish can be violent and punishable,” Ali says. In this production, the Hispanic Romeo can only speak his native tongue at home and is reprimanded by his cousin Benvolio for daring to do so anywhere else. Juliet learns Spanish from a household servant, Pedro (a minor character, Peter, in the original), and the language becomes the lovers’ secret code. The two find solace through their connection.

Ali has developed something of a track record of using multiple languages in his productions. His bilingual audio play Romeo y Julieta, which was released as a podcast during the pandemic, starred Nyong’o and Juan Castano. Now, Ali concedes, the approach “didn’t say anything conceptual about the story.” But the director fine-tuned the idea for his refugee-crisis-inflected production of Twelfth Night last year, in which the private use of Swahili connected select characters as they made their way in a foreign land.

Ali understands Shakespeare’s brilliance lies in the malleability of his works. “Why do we keep coming back to these characters whose fates we know?” Ali asks. He remembers seeing Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet in a Nairobi cinema, with the baby-faced Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes gazing at each other through a fish tank. “You don’t need text when you have such a strong visual,” he says. Ali calls West Side Story, the 1957 musical set among dueling New York gangs, the piece’s “most glorious adaptation and translation,” recognizable without replicating each specific element. He shares a passion with Aikens for the haunting score of Franco Zeffirelli’s faithful 1968 movie.

“Even at her young age, she’s unsatisfied,” Aikens says. The actor’s eyes roll up in gentle empathy. “Part of her is grieving that she hasn’t yet been able to live or decide what she wants, and then she meets Romeo and, finally, it’s like she can survive through this love.” The two are coming up in an imperiled world, and Aikens, while proud of her accomplishment, sees her casting as almost “a new kind of stunt—we’re so used to seeing celebrities and people with established careers in these roles.” She says she’ll have to work a little to believe that she didn’t trick someone into giving her the part.

“Right, right,” Hernández says, gently curtailing this line of thought. “I think what’s great, at least what helps me, is thinking I’m not alone. We’re in this together.”

In this story: hair, Edward Lampley; makeup, Mark Carrasquillo; tailor, Tae Yoshida for Carol Ai Studio Tailors.

Produced by Boom Productions Inc.