The actors in A Downtown Eastside Romeo and Juliet are clearly learning a lot from their director, Gina Bastone, who is one of Vancouver’s favourite clowns.

On the day I visited the rehearsal studio, I watched a character played by Priscillia Tait answer the phone. Priscillia is a First Nations resident of the Downtown Eastside, and on-stage her character was selling reality tours of the neighbourhood to gullible visitors for $2,000 a pop. That price included a vision and a map. “Go into the alley and you’ll meet your spiritual guide,” she told a German couple. “A rat will give you a sign.” “Ve’re going to see a ret!” the couple chanted in accents borrowed straight from Hogan’s Heroes. “Ve’re going to see a ret!”

Gena Thompson, who plays the German woman, bounced up and down in near-orgasmic glee. Director Gina Bastone wanted more from Mike Richter, who had recently taken over the role of the German man from an actor who got sick. “Mike! Poverty! Rats! It turns you on! It hits you here!” Bastone said, making a chopping motion towards her crotch.

The show, which is a Vancouver Moving Theatre production, runs at the Russian Hall from tonight (April 17) to April 27.

When I dropped by almost two weeks ago, Bastone told me the script was undergoing constant revisions. The draft that I read started with an eight-page comic version of Romeo and Juliet, which was written by Mike Stack, then shifted to a separate story written by Bastone. The second, satirical part tells the tale of a young Chinese Canadian woman who leaves her wealthy developer father’s home and meets a homeless man. Shakespeare’s original speaks of “two households, both alike in dignity”; in this rewrite, the conflicting factions are the wealthy and the dispossessed.

Some of the actors have performed before, but many will be making their acting debuts. There has been a considerable amount of skill development going on. “We’ve got [physical-theatre trainer] Dean Fogal in doing Renaissance dance,” Bastone told me. “We’ve been doing a lot of singing. And we’ve got a lot of mask work in here, so we’ve been working on mask technique a lot.…The ball scene [in the opening section] is going to be beautiful—everyone in masks. And there’s another scene that’s in full masks: there’s a guy who’s waiting for drugs, and the spirits of everyone who’s waited for drugs before him are there, too, like—you know—traces.”

Clearly, she expects quality work from her performers. When I was watching the rehearsal, one of the actors became frustrated with himself for forgetting his lines. “Yeah,” Bastone snapped. “Quit beating yourself up and let’s just do it.” Later, she added the time-honoured reassurance that all actors need to hear: “Be loud enough, try to have your face out when you’re speaking, and it’s all gonna work.”