"Julius Caesar" is both an easy play and a hard one. It's easy because it's just so beautiful; it's fundamentally about the power of rhetoric and a plethora of famous lines have made it one of Shakespeare's most quoted plays. In that sense, at least, it would be hard to mess up.
But for all of its moving speeches and witty quips, "Julius Caesar" often finds itself navigating the dangerous line between history and parody when it makes the move from page to stage.
Is there any way to put men into togas without at least a little humor?
With that in mind, the American Repertory Theatre (ART) brings Caesar back to the stage, re-imagined both aesthetically and narratively in a new revival at the Loeb Theater through mid-March. The play is directed by French director Arthur Nauzyciel, and though Nauzyciel's choices span from compelling to distracting, it's a revival worth seeing, if only to remind oneself why high school teachers made students read "Julius Caesar" in the first place.
It is a daunting task to take on the many Caesars that came before, but Nauzyciel isn't afraid to challenge the image audiences traditionally associate with the play. The first and most noticeable change is the production's iconographic identification with 1960's America. The cast is dressed in dark suits and thick glasses, armed with champagne glasses and seated on curvy chairs.
For older audience members and those who are history-savvy, these images should call to attention the connections between the assassinations of Caesar and Kennedy. There is a sense of affluence and dirty secrecy, a sense that politics is a game the rich play amongst themselves which resonates in Shakespeare's words and modern life. The irony that the choice to save democracy is made secretly, in the early hours of morning, by a chosen few senators should not be lost on us.
In this sense, seeing "Julius Caesar" on stage is particularly meaningful because there is a key parallel between actors and audience, politicians and public. The set design, a life-size reproduction of the theater on the other side of the stage, reminds us that we are the public in the Roman forum, the spectators and subjects of this drama, and as such we are also indicted in Caesar's death.
Each character in "Julius Caesar" must confront the burden of his own sins, and at times when characters speak directly to the audience, we feel like a jury who must pass judgment on each character in turn. Was Brutus wrong to betray Caesar? What might we have done if we were in his situation? "Julius Caesar" has no villain; every character is both villain and victim, and the staging reminds us that we must become a part of the play by deciding where guilt lies.
But while setting and staging may integrate and indict the audience, other aspects of the revival do less to make us feel connected than to remind us that we are not part of the elite groups at the core of this play, neither artistic nor political. The jazz trio woven throughout the drama, for example, is unnecessary. In a play with a runtime of almost three hours, we spend an awfully long time listening to a singer conveying through music what we already know through words.
Other quirky choices are equally distracting. In later scenes, for example, people enter and leave stage by ducking and rolling. Have we gotten lost on our way back from intermission and found ourselves in a stage production of "James Bond?" Other details like this are confusing and frustratingly unnecessary. Theater isn't like a surrealist painting; when we're attached to characters and care what happens to them, we have less tolerance for the symbolic and the ridiculous.
It's worth noting that if the music, the stage designs, even the dancing were toned down just a little bit, this play would be profoundly affecting. The cast includes the talented Jim True-Frost of "The Wire," James Waterston and Mark L. Montgomery. Their performances overcome the many distractions and it's a pleasure to watch them on stage.
In the end, this performance doesn't hit all the right notes, but at its core it has a good sense of what makes "Julius Caesar" relevant and beautiful. The A.R.T. took a stab at it and came out with a respectable production.
Julius Caesar Written by William Shakespeare Directed by Arthur Nauzyciel At the American Repertory Theatre through Mar. 16 Tickets $39 and up
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