Set in a military academy, Alan Brown’s Private Romeo (2011) is a love story between two young men where Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is the ancient grudge forbidding this pairing, even though it is never mentioned. Brown liberates the text from its minimum daily requirements and embraces a brilliantly pedestrian approach - jumping between a high school class struggling with Romeo & Juliet to the struggles of love and hate in the hallways of an empty school - to juxtapose how we learn and how we live Shakespeare.