(BRADLEY BEACH, NJ) -- The Bradley Beach Arts Council presents a free staging of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare on Friday, July 21 and Saturday July 22.  The performance takes place at 7:00pm at the Fifth Avenue and Ocean Gazebo on the boardwalk in Bradley Beach.

The place is Verona, Italy.  It is a play written almost five centuries ago and yet so timely in its content.  A pair of Star crossed lovers thwarted by outside forces.  Love and hate, light and dark, youth and age. Fate?

Shakespeare was making a political statement about war and peace.  His ending predicts peace between the warring Capulets and the Montagues due to a tragedy.  But will that peace remain a constant?  Does any peace between peoples of different lands and cultures?

Romeo is a hero and Juliet a heroine.  No doubt about that fact.  Will war ever cease?  Can hate turn to love? 

Shakespeare’s character the Nurse does believe that love is the most important thing in the world and wants to pass on the happiness she had in her marital love to her beloved Juliet.  She is an innocent and optimist.  However the play ends with the tragic cries of Nurse, “O woe, O woeful, woeful day... Never was seen so black a day as this…”

“A glooming peace this morning with it brings / The sun for sorrow will not show his head / Go hence to have more talk of these sad things/ Some shall be pardoned and some punished / For never was a story of more woe/ Than this of Juliet and her Romeo”

For more information visit www.bradleybeachnj.gov