E-Mail This Article to a Friend Pillow talk The Real Thing; Romeo and Juliet BY CAROLYN CLAY

Love hurts, but in The Real Thing and Romeo and Juliet, it’s never something you can’t talk about. Not when master scribes Tom Stoppard and William Shakespeare are forming the phonemes. "Words, words, words," says Hamlet dismissively of language. But for the Bard of Avon and the nimble author of Arcadia, well-wielded words are song, sword, and surgical instrument, thrilling, slashing, dissecting, and piercing to the perilous heart of things.

The gossamer-veiled Stoppard stand-in of The Real Thing (presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre through October 9), intellectual Brit playwright Henry, both reveres and hides behind verbal constructs, formulating urgent and precise paeans to the power of words that are second only to his passionate if rigid dissertations on love — and just slightly more fervent than his declarations of devotion to the indelible banalities of pop music and his tirades against simplistic politics. The real Stoppard juggles all kinds of constructs in this 1984 Tony Award winner, which debuted in London in ’82. The play begins with a brittle encounter in which a husband confronts his wife with a discovery of adultery. As we learn in the subsequent scene, this initial gambit is from one of Henry’s plays, in which his wife, Charlotte, acts (stiffly) with their actor friend Max, who is married to fellow thespian Annie. Roughly the same confrontation will be repeated twice as a "real thing," proving emotionally sloppier and less glib than in Henry’s play. Which is, of course, the point.

The Real Thing is anything but sloppy, though it appears glibber at the Huntington than it did in the heartfelt performances of Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close back in 1984. That’s partly because the towering and symbolic set by Kris Stone is distancing and partly because Rufus Collins dances smugly if smoothly over the compulsively articulate surface of Henry without digging into the anguish of a man who wants to believe commitment comes with all the rules of well-trussed language but must learn to live with the painful flux of human relations.

Under Evan Yionoulis’s direction, Stoppard’s thinking man’s soap opera unfolds on Stone’s vast slate-colored set — apart from a train compartment, it’s a series of upscale contemporary dwellings punctuated by fissures of cloudy sky and shadowed by a bedroom that, as marriages go cold or crumble, gets snowed on or cracks apart. Collins’s ardent if argumentative Henry leaves jaded Charlotte (a knowing Meg Gibson) and daughter Debbie (Pepper Binkley) to live with sophisticated free spirit Annie (Kate Nowlin, done up in rumpled tresses and long skirts), who is more irritated than moved by the puling pain of rejected spouse Max (Matthew Boston). Two years pass during intermission, and act two finds Henry distressed at sharing Annie first with her political cause célèbre, jailed protester, amateur Marxist, and aspiring dramatist Brodie (Adam Saunders), and then with her younger ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore co-star, Billy (William Thompson).

Stoppard invests much of his own brilliant, self-depreciating self in romantic absolutist Henry, whose blinkered passions include not only Annie and the sanctity of language but the output of Herman’s Hermits and the Monkees. Indeed, the Huntington production ups the ante of pop cris du cœur punctuating the script, from the Righteous Brothers’ "You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ " to Procol Harum’s "A Whiter Shade of Pale" (from which Henry insists "cheeky beggar" Bach stole his "Air on a G String"). And though Stoppard is as heady here as ever, he puts in Henry’s mouth several defenses of messy, committed love that are as long on sincerity and suffering as they are on composition. At the Huntington, though, it’s the brain, rather than the heart, that races.

In Romeo and Juliet (presented by New Repertory Theatre at the Arsenal Center for the Arts through October 9), Shakespeare puts love, more than labeling, on a pedestal: "That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet," says Juliet of her new boyfriend’s Capulet-unfriendly family name. Yet the Bard’s early tragedy of teen love boasts bouquets of poetic language known to every English-speaking schoolchild. Although director Rick Lombardo doesn’t stint the vaunted lyricism, he’s more interested in pageantry, political allusion, and young love’s careering, hormonally driven rashness. Not to mention in stretching into his spanking new 300-plus-seat playing space in the Arsenal Center for the Arts.

This mostly-by-the-book Romeo and Juliet, its denizens gotten up in blacks and reds that run the gamut from Renaissance to punk, unfolds against a loggia battered by bullet holes. The stained-glass window of Friar Laurence’s church is broken, and outside there’s the flattened evidence of a car bombing. Evidently the "civil brawls" between Montagues and Capulets have been pretty bad. Lombardo, abetted by fight director Ted Hewlett, makes the most of the arm and leg room provided by the comfortable new space, serving up some swashbuckling sword fights and a less convincing confrontation in the Capulet tomb, where Paris menaces Romeo with a revolver that for some reason he fails to fire. Similarly, the Capulet revels — at which our tragic teens lock eyes (and a mean, linguistically soaring flirtation) on each other — are effective: masked, dreamy, and a little sinister.

But apart from the expansive housing and a discreet Middle Eastern undercurrent to the Capulet-Montague feud, Lombardo has few ideas about the play — apart from the apparent feeling that no opportunity to make a phallic gesture should be eschewed and that a pratfall or two never hurt a tragedy. His staging is mostly a high-pitched march from ball to brawl to bier, with candles flickering effectively at start and finish and snatches of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 — written as a response to World War II horrors — lending an aching, holy touch.

For his inaugural Arsenal outing, the Elliot Norton Award–winning director fields an uneven if professional cast. (The Chorus speeches are handled by the ensemble as a somber whole, and the diction is exceedingly clear for groupspeak.) Lucas Hall is an able, handsome Romeo, both fickle and fervent. His boyish agitation barely contained in the balcony scene, he’s callow enough to stand by and let the Nurse be manhandled by Mercutio. And having dropped his resolve to make peace between his posse and Juliet’s, he dives with surprising bloodlust into the spearing of Tybalt. But the lovesick youngster takes on a more mature charm as the play progresses, and he meets his fate with a plaintive calm. Jennifer Lafleur’s Juliet is less successful. Perhaps to accent the smitten teen’s youth, she plays her as mostly vexed and petulant, with an unwelcome echo of Britney Spears lauding her big love. And her voice is insufficient conduit for the exuberant poetry the Bard places in Juliet’s mouth.

Diego Arciniegas, in clerical collar and combat boots, presents an unusually muscular, far from avuncular Friar Laurence, whose affection for Romeo is palpable but whose advice is terse and tough. The reliable Bobbie Steinbach, however, is a stock Nurse. Most interesting among the supporting players is Joe Plummer’s balletic Mercutio, less flamboyant than spell casting. Apart from his ringleader, the male Montague gang, waggling swords, making dirty gestures, and humping one another when nothing better presents itself, pump enough testosterone to fill the tank of an SUV. It’s too bad the parents — appropriately distraught and remorseful in the end — are too busy fanning the flames to put a little saltpeter in the oatmeal.