Wedding season has begun, doubly so in Central Park, where the Public Theatre’s Shakespeare in the Park season is kicking off with “Romeo and Juliet.” The star-crossed lovers have a wedding, of course, but their marriage is clandestine and tragically brief. Saheem Ali, who directs the Park production, wants to send the audience out with a little hope. So, each night, the play will end with a real couple tying the knot onstage after the performance. “Let’s demonstrate that we have the capacity to overcome tragedy, to overcome our worst impulses,” Ali said the other day. “And what better way than to end the first half of the show with the fictional marriage and the second half with an actual marriage?”

Ali’s production is set at the U.S.-Mexico border, with a Latino Romeo and a gringa Juliet; the stage at the Delacorte is dominated by an ominous slab of border wall. Before rehearsals, Ali took a research trip to Laredo, Texas, to see the actual wall nearby. At a coffee shop, he met an artist who makes collages out of paper money, including a dollar-bill Jesus. The artist and his fiancée showed him videos of border marriages, and Ali invited the pair to New York to get married onstage one night. “Then we decided to expand the idea and do it every night,” he said at the theatre, just before the first preview.

The production had already booked couples for thirty of the thirty-two performances—mostly weddings, with a few vow renewals, including for the actors playing Benvolio and Pedro. The Public didn’t want to advertise online, fearing a deluge, so it found couples by word of mouth. Francis Jue, the actor playing Friar Lawrence, became an ordained officiant through the Universal Life Church. (So did his understudy, just in case.) Like any good wedding planner, the theatre has a rainy-day backup—a backstage area where the weddings can go on even if the show doesn’t.

The Public also hired a wedding coördinator, Carla Perez, who ushered in the inaugural couple, Kay Wasil and Teague Hollister. Both are trans, and they wore matching suits—Wasil’s white, Hollister’s jade—which they’d spent the week embroidering. Wasil, who has a neon-green mullet, adjusted the beaded boutonnière on Hollister’s lapel. Both perform as drag kings, Wasil under the name Chevy Lace and Hollister as Hugh Mann Race. They met at a drag show in Brooklyn in 2021. “I was, like, Wow, this person’s so cute,” Hollister recalled. “We started hanging out, and Kay gave an impassioned speech about how you should never date within the drag community. I was, like, Heard.”