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It's hard to figure out how many times Romeo and Juliet have died onstage. The plays is four hundred and some odd years old, and one of Shakespeare's most popular, even when the playwright was alive. And so it is that his star-cross'd juvenile lovers get trotted out with great frequency, to sweet talk each other on a balcony and then protractedly dispatch themselves in the Capulet crypt. I suspect more Romeos and Juliets have died onstage than any two other characters in history, with their equally doomed friends and kinsmen Mercutio and Tybalt coming in close behind.

I've never really known what to make of the generalized idiocy of the play. It's a deliberate idiocy on Shakespeare's part, but it's still troubling. The simmering hostilities between the houses of Montague and Capulet are scarcely explained, and the young Montague Romeo is a callow and feckless lad, moping over his love of the unseen Rosaline at the start of the play and then instantly forgetting her the moment he meets the 13-year-old Juliet. The relationship between Romeo and Juliet is brief and unsatisfying -- they see each other and spout poetry for an hour, and then, out of the blue, marry -- an impulsive decision that even the Elizabethans would have considered ill-advised. And then, in a series of dramatically improbable events, the two begin their march toward self-destruction. Were these modern times and both kids were to wind up on Dr. Phil, both would receive very stern lectured about the impulsiveness of their actions, the excessiveness of their responses, and the shallowness of their relationship, as would anybody who married young after a courting period of a few hours and then threatened suicide any time anything went wrong.

But whatever. Romeo and Juliet isn't going to lose any audience members because I think the main characters' romance is trashy rather than moving. And, in fact, the Children's Theatre Company is currently introducing a new generation of theatergoers to the play, in an abbreviated production that seems to move the central romance out of the houses of opposing political factions in Renaissance Verona and places it is something like a trailer park. The play is mounted in a fashion the theater has dubbed "promenade style," meaning the entire Cargill Theater has been converted into a set. Audience members mill about as the cast engages in bits of business, sunning themselves on the theater's floor, cooking onions on a hotplate, and, at one point, inviting audience members to keep a beach ball aloft. It's a deliciously low-rent set, with the walls hung with posters for rock concerts, and with various little hovels set up here and there. The house of Montague, as an example, has a dart board, an outside refrigerator (from which Romeo's father regularly takes bottles of beer), an oversized fan, and a dart board. All that's missing is a partially dissembled car on concrete blocks in the front lawn.

There's a shabby chic to this set that you also find in the cast. The young folks generally look like they've just come back from a rock concert, and they tend to favor very tight pants, sleeveless t-shirts, and vests. Juliet, played by Lindsey Alexandra Hartley, wears one of those blousy sun-dresses that used to be popular with hippie chicks, and she wears her hair under a silk scarf and wears rose-tited granny glasses; when music plays, she sways in place with her hands outstretched, looking, for all the world, like a girl you would find pressed up to the front of the stage at a Strawberry Alarm Clock concert, circa 1967. Mercutio has a droopy mustache and long hair, and, if the play had the budget, one suspects we would constantly see him racing around the stage on a Harley Davidson motorcycle. The adults in the play, in the meanwhile, tend to look like aging hipsters in Florida, in straw hats and shiny suits and loud shirts with flyaway collars. In the meanwhile, a mandolin player and an accordionist wander around the set, providing a live soundtrack of vaguely gypsy airs, and, if the music is loud and driving enough, the cast members will invite audience members to dance.

So there is both a sense of fun in the staging of this production and a sleazy glamor to it, as though Sunset Strip costumers, armed with a budget of $300, decided to take every resident of the Krestwood Mobile Home Park to Ragstock and give them a makeover. Romeo, here played by Matt Rein, is still going to beg his own dagger for death at one point in the play, but he's going to look great doing it. This sort of visual panache even extends to the staging of the play, by director Greg Banks. During Meructio and Tybalt's deadly duel, cast members rush around and herd the audience away from the center of the stage, warning that there is going to be a fight. And what a fight! The two men go after each other with knives, baseball bats, and, eventually, dual meat cleavers, and the choreography is expansive and savage, consisting of hoarse taunts, sudden lunges, and then a lot of noisy confusion -- so noisy and confusing, in fact, that it looks as though Mercutio doesn't die from a blow from Tybalt, but instead from accidentally brushing against Romeo's drawn dagger.

Romeo and Juliet is a play that has confounded critics for hundreds of years, because it has no obvious overarching theme, but here, in this moment, Greg Banks seems to have found one. He might have glamorized the characters with their thrift store threads, but he deglamorizes their behavior. Romeo and Juliet tend to act like headstrong and shortsighted children in this show, and the rest of their family acts like bullies. Violence stupidly erupts and stupidly kills, and, when the titular lovers take their own lives at the end of the play, it is not a romantic moment but a moment of more blundering, as, if the hotheaded Romeo had just waited a little longer, rather than stampeding toward his own doom, the story might have had a happier ending. This production ends with both Romeo and Juliet's families chagrined by the idiocy of the events they have participated in, which has led, not to a great romantic tragedy, but to two children destroying themselves for no good reason at all. Dr. Phil would not be happy.

Romeo and Juliet plays through March 15 at the Children's Theatre Company, 612.874.0400.