It’s always smart to schedule a production of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar–the current Public Theater Shakespeare in the Park offering–during a presidential campaign. Audience members are practically guaranteed to nod their heads and murmur “still timely” while experiencing pangs of recognition at all the political cutthroat.
Of course, in this play “cut-throat” is meant quite literally. As is “blood bath,” since Caesar’s assassins complete the ritual of their slicing him up by dipping their hands and forearms in his blood, reveling in it for a few ghoulish minutes and only then dispatching Brutus to explain to the outraged city electorate why murder was necessary.
Brutus–for those who don’t remember the drama from high school–does famously make the mistake of allowing Marc Antony to speak after him. This season, it could be that the line-up of speakers will make playgoers think of nominee George W. Bush’s adept acceptance speech as followed by Al Gore’s rabble-rousing one.
That Marc Antony’s sleek and manipulative address is still being delivered 400 years after it was first written (and Al Gore’s likely will not be) isn’t a concern here; nor does the fact that Antony extemporizes in blank verse, while Brutus declaims in prose, find much of a parallel in the Bush-Gore lectern-thumpers. But the attempt by both Brutus and Antony to galvanize and sway an edgy, malleable mob definitely has a contemporary ring, and probably always will. Certainly, director Barry Edelstein, who has for some time been demonstrating his knack for slapping Shakespeare into life, works efficiently to make the Bard’s message concerning the steep price paid for political expediency register as cogent.
Quick and to the point, Julius Caesar takes place during the first few days and months after the title character (played by David McCallum) has subdued his predecessor, Pompey. He returns so triumphantly to Rome that his followers fear he may accept the citizens’ demands that he become emperor. Those worried about Caesar’s becoming omnipotent to the detriment of their own vaulting ambition are Marc Antony (played by Jeffrey Wright, listed as “Mark Antony” in the program), who nonetheless is wily about biding time before planting his own banner; Brutus (Jamey Sheridan), who’s in a moral debate with himself on the honorable way to proceed; and Caius Cassius (Dennis Boutsikaris), who’s determined to get revenge on a leader with whom he’s fallen out of favor.
In a much briefer time than Plutarch reported it actually took for the dark events to unfold, Cassius enlists Brutus to join him in the plot to snuff out the flattery-friendly Caesar. Marc Antony, the shrewdest strategist of them all, wins the plebeians to his side and throws in with Octavius Caesar and his advancing army. By play’s end, Cassius’ malevolence has backfired, Brutus’ misguided probity has been his undoing, and Antony lives to show up a few tragedies later as Cleopatra’s sated paramour.
For this Julius Caesar, Edelstein and set designer Narelle Sissons have imagined a city-state already in an advanced state of decay. The stones of Rome are askew; graffiti is rife. On one side of the littered stage, a huge, gilt replica of Caesar’s head hangs from a crane as if decapitated, while a severed marble hand lies helplessly on the other side. Fires smolder beneath metal grates and flare up unpredictably.
Across this already bloodied cityscape, Edelstein’s actors swarm like an infestation of roaches. And the major pests–er, thespians–are each in his way frighteningly effective. (This is a man’s play in which the only women–Calpurnia, Portia, a caterwauling seer–smell the befouled air but can do nothing to sweeten it.) As Caesar, McCallum is both commanding and puerile, at once nobody’s fool and everybody’s, which is how Shakespeare wrote the part. Noting that Cassius “has a lean and hungry look,” McCallum gets Caesar’s perspicacity across, but he’s also good at playing the overgrown boy who demands to have his way. Edelstein takes advantage of McCallum’s size; the actor is shorter than those who play his assassins, and therefore his violent end, with so many bodies looming over him, is all the more horrifying.