Under Israeli director Gadi Roll, the epic cast delivers this unrelentingly bleak message while marching across a thick band of sand that runs the length of the Loeb Drama Center stage, with some seating in back of the action instead of to the sides. The Montagues and Capulets are rival posses, as they were in Baz Luhrmann's hyperventilating Hollywood version, ''William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet."
Roll makes Luhrmann look reverential. Boras's Juliet and Mickey Solis's Romeo don't seem particularly interested in breaking away from the violence around them; they would as soon pull out a blade themselves.
In theory, there's nothing wrong with any of this. Great directors often find exciting new ways of bending Shakespeare -- last summer's great ''Macbeth" by Max Stafford-Clark and his Out of Joint company in Holyoke, which transformed Scotland into an African dictatorship, comes to mind.
But here Shakespeare is bent beyond recognition, partly by Roll's insistence on banishing any semblance of beauty, hope, or, indeed, humanity from the play and partly by the inability of most of the young actors to walk a ''Pulp Fiction"-style walk and chew Elizabethan gum at the same time.
The exceptions are the veterans, particularly Thomas Derrah and Will LeBow, who invest their Friar Laurence and Capulet, respectively, with all the fury that Roll seems to be looking for without sacrificing any of the emotional force in the verse. Derrah makes Laurence into as power-driven and corrupt a force as the other adults, and LeBow's frustrations at being the ineffectual husband of a sex-starved, alcoholic, desperate housewife come pouring out in his rage at Juliet.
