The Langston Hughes Outside the Box performance on the YoungArts campus. Photo by Michael D. Bolden.

William Shakespeare speaks to our human condition in ways that transcend place and language. But in “Romeo & Juliet Outside the Box,” created specifically for the plaza on the YoungArts Biscayne Boulevard campus, playwright, actor and director Tarell Alvin McCraney and filmmaker Andrew Hevia give a classic story a distinct Miami accent.

The performance at 7 p.m. Friday, May 8, is free and open to the public. It is the last Outside the Box performance of the season. The series, which started in October 2014, has included events featuring the Borscht Film Festival, Miami City Ballet, McCraney and, most recently, “The Langston Hughes Project,” a multimedia concert performance of Hughes’ “Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz,” on April 18. The Outside the Box series uses the plaza outside the iconic Jewel Box building, in what once was the United States headquarters of the Bacardi rum company, as a performance space.

“The idea was to create an experience using the texture and the shape of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’” explained McCraney, the director of “Romeo & Juliet Outside the Box” in an interview with collaborator and producer Hevia at YoungArts’s offices in Miami. “We took the many disciplines of artists who work in and around Miami and who also are closely affiliated with YoungArts and the Miami City Ballet, and we created what we think of as an experiential evening of ‘Romeo & Juliet.’” Knight Foundation supports the work of both YoungArts and Miami City Ballet.

As an international playwright in residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company, McCraney created the radical new version of “Antony and Cleopatra” he presented at the Colony Theater in Miami Beach in January 2014, which grew from a winning Knight Arts Challenge idea. This “Romeo & Juliet,” he cautions, will not be a standard theater production.

“You won’t be able to come, sit down in a chair and watch,” says McCraney, who is also a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. The work “is based on various interpretations of Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ But there are multidisciplinary performances happening throughout the space, and there is a promenade aspect to it, so the audience would be walking about the open space.”

Hevia, who has chronicled life in Miami in works such as “Rising Tide: A Story of Miami Artists” and is the co-founder of the Borscht Film Festival, which is sponsored by Knight Foundation, notes that “it’s a collaboration between break dancers and ballet dancers, film, all sort of arts meld together and you as an audience get to explore that at your own pace — but also at a pace set by the show.”

“Ultimately, YoungArts is a collaborative organization about the many disciplinary arts,” says Hevia, who, like McCraney, is a YoungArts alumnus. ”And this performance reflects that. “

With this project, says McCraney, “YoungArts afforded me the chance to do something I’ve been trying to do for a long time: try and experiment with Shakespeare and classic stories in a way that doesn’t involve traditional theater settings in order to invite the communities of Miami who I feel are underserved to theatrical and performing events that feel organic to our environment. We hope this is a huge success and it spawns more experiences like it.”

In fact, McCraney and Hevia, who are both Miami natives, see this performance as part of the continuing growth of the Miami arts scene, something reflected as much in the quality of the work and roots of many of the participating artists as in the setting and approach.

“Working with so many artists from various institutions or companies from around the city is … at the same time daunting but also exciting,” says McCraney. The group, he notes, includes veterans from New York stages and Broadway tours, but also a couple of graduating high school students. As for the idea of embracing such an open, informal, outdoor setting, he sees it as Miami asserting its own identity rather than copying formulas that might have worked in other places.

“When I was younger, in the late ’90s, there was this idea that we had to go out and build this kind of theater or this kind of movie house or this kind of museum because that’s what they had in New York or London, or what they did in Philadelphia,” says McCraney. “And I would say ‘Sure, that’s great and wonderful—for them, who have terrible weather 75 percent of the year. But please tell me how are you going to go to someone and say, ‘Hamlet’ is four hours long. It’s a play about a guy who’s depressed, lost one of his parents and is trying to kill his stepfather. Now come in from having this nice martini outside, and sit in this dark room in which you can’t see anybody and watch it.’ It’s a hard sell. Whereas if you can find a way to sell it as a story of revenge … well, people might get into that, and then, if you say you are having it at a place where you could have a good drink, and watch [the play] and still be part of the Miami outdoor experience, now all of sudden your stock goes way up.”

After all, he says, it’s an approach successfully used in other places.

“In London they built their theaters so you can come in and have a drink and read a book and do things inside because, one, it’s nicer inside than outside, and, two, people like pubs,” he says. “So every theater in London has a great bar with great food, where you can read the newspaper and just have dinner. So rather than embracing what this did for them, I think it’s important for us to say, ‘This is how we do it.’”

Fernando González is a Miami-based arts and culture writer. He can be reached via email at [email protected].