Performing Arts

This couple got married at the end of Romeo and Juliet — and so will 31 others

June 20, 20265:00 AM ET

By Jennifer Vanasco

An hour before curtain, Oscar Diaz and his fiancée Janelly Mendoza both look a little shell-shocked as they’re being ushered onto the stage of the Delacorte Theater, the Central Park home of Free Shakespeare in the Park in New York.

“I’m Francis,” says actor Francis Jue. Tonight, he not only plays Friar Lawrence in the Public Theater’s production of Romeo and Juliet — he’s also going to be the officiant at Mendoza and Diaz’s real, legal wedding.

The couple, who have known each other since they were children, live in Laredo, Tex. — that’s where they met the Public’s associate artistic director Saheem Ali.

Ali was in Laredo because his Romeo and Juliet is set at the U.S. Mexican border. In it, Romeo’s family is Latino; Juliet’s family supports the border patrol. Ali wanted to see for himself the wall there that separates the two countries.

Mendoza and Diaz “introduced me to the culture,” Ali says. And they told him about a special ritual in border cities. A Mexican citizen and a U.S. citizen will marry on a bridge— each standing in their own country — with an officiant in the middle.

“So I thought, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be beautiful to actually have a real wedding at the end of the play to mirror Romeo and Juliet’s wedding?'” Ali says. “That marriage didn’t get to see the future. But if we had a real couple who we married at the end, and they got to go into the future, it just gives us all some hope.”

He mentioned the idea to Mendoza and Diaz at the time — they just brushed it off.

“Just regular people like us don’t do that stuff, you know?” Mendoza says. “But then Saheem messaged us. And then it’s like, ‘Okay, it’s happening!'”

Diaz and Mendoza with Jue and the cast of Romeo and Juliet, after the wedding ceremony.

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