Theater Rejects Interracial ‘Romeo and Juliet’ : Stage: Some board members voice their concern that La Habra’s ‘predominantly older’ audience would not accept the relationship.

The board of the La Habra Community Theatre has rejected a director’s plans to put an interracial spin on the doomed romance in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.”

The action, taken in an emergency meeting Wednesday, came after director Marla Gam-Hudson had placed ads seeking a black Romeo in the Los Angeles-based trade publication Drama-Logue.

Gam-Hudson said some of the board members expressed concern to her before the meeting that La Habra’s “predominantly older” audience “would not easily accept a mixed racial relationship” in the play. She said she was told that casting a Romeo and Juliet of different races was “an exciting idea but just not appropriate for this community theater at this time.”

The director of several plays in Orange County in recent years, Gam-Hudson said she would abide by the board’s decision but that auditions, set for Sunday and Monday, would go on as scheduled.

According to Rand Hudson, the director’s husband and a board member who was at the meeting, the decision does not preclude a multiracial cast. The board, in essence, told Gam-Hudson not to cast the play, he said, “in a way that emphasized racial differences between the families or the lovers.”

Gam-Hudson, who did not attend the meeting, said she interprets that to mean that the leads could be cast with actors of any ethnic group, as long as they are both of the same race. She said she had wanted to make the main relationship interracial as a commentary on bigotry.

Hudson said the board’s concern was less with casting than with changing the play’s focus. The board “did not want some sort of racial message one way or another placed on ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ ”

Gregory Kind, La Habra director of community services and the city’s representative on the board, said the board wanted a traditional “Romeo and Juliet” partly to provide a point of comparison for “West Side Story,” the season’s next offering. The 1957 musical set “Romeo and Juliet” in 1950s New York, with the feuding families transformed into rival gangs.

Last year, a traveling company in Port Gibson, Miss., staged a “Romeo and Juliet” that reset the story in a Mississippi town with a black youth and a white girl. According to reports, community leaders were “nervous,” but the show went off without a hitch.

“Romeo and Juliet” will run at La Habra’s Depot Playhouse Oct. 26-Nov. 18.