In
Colder Blood
By Jonathan Kalb
Julius Caesar
By William Shakespeare
Theatre for a New Audience
Lucille Lortel Theatre
121 Christopher St.
Jan. 19 - Mar. 2, 2003
Box office: (212) 239-6200
True to its political essence, Shakespeare's
Julius Caesar has been spun sundry ways. According to
my ninth-grade English teacher (a man who insisted that poetry
had to rhyme, ca. 1973), it was a play about good but misguided
people obsessed with saving a republic from tyranny. Nothing like
a trumpeted half-truth for getting a kid to mistrust authority.
In 1941, the great Expressionist director Jürgen Fehling did the
play in Berlin with a loftily imperial Caesar (played by Werner
Krauss) whose fall was treated as a metaphysical catastrophe.
After the war, Fehling claimed that--Shakespeare's text being
intact--his production had really been an act of anti-Nazi resistance.
Trevor Nunn, in 1972 London, depicted Caesar's Rome explicitly
as a fascist police state, guarded by Mussolini-style black-shirts.
There, John Wood's self-hating "noble Brutus" seemed to have no
hope of redeeming his country because he didn't believe in his
own nobility.
Now Karin Coonrod has brought us a Julius
Caesar for the Bush/Enron era, with its appalling shamelessness
about corporate privilege, its "selected" leader's bogus claim
to a popular mandate, and its bullying "realpolitik," smeared
like crude plaster over all the cracks in the leader's understanding
of complex issues. Coonrod's Roman ruling elite wear uniform,
coal-black business suits, accessorized at times with cloaks but
otherwise wholly contemporary (costumes by Catherine Zuber). These
predominantly young Romans are comfortably entitled former frat-boys
who--with the single exception of Brutus--care nothing for ideals,
or even competence. They brood, conspire, murder, and justify
amid a shifting array of rough concrete panels that split them
into factions (sometimes showing only their legs) and underscore
the bare-knuckles nature of the game they presume they're playing
(set by Douglas Stein). Their murder of Caesar is like an internal
housekeeping matter, a ritual expulsion from Skull and Bones.
Coonrod's Theatre for a New Audience production
is sleek, lucid, nimble, and punctuated with a profusion of electronic
booms and light blasts in the audience's eyes. Employing a severely
cut text (edited by Edward Hall and Roger Warren, with Coonrod's
help), it clocks in at less than two intermissionless hours, its
considerable power residing in the clarity of several key actors
and in its grim impression of a snowballing epochal disaster.
Earl Hindman's Julius Caesar is a tired, pot-bellied hulk of a
man who walks with a cane at home and exudes a pompous, devil-may-care,
rhetorically self-aggrandizing air. Daniel Oreskes's balding,
high-strung Cassius is just the joker to give this snowball a
push--the archetypal unctuous, paranoid "beta male" who smells
infirmity in his bitterly envied "alpha" rival and instinctively
itches to exterminate him.
Brutus--who is really the play's central
role, notwithstanding Shakespeare's title--is traditionally played
as the idealistic complement to all the others' meanness and depravity,
but the role is tricky, since the actor has to convey something
of Hamlet's ruminativeness without hesitating to act, and has
to be likeable without denying that his hands are bloody and that
loathsome Cassius is his good friend. Thomas M. Hammond doesn't
quite negotiate this balance. His Brutus is a moderate and thoughtful
voice temporarily tolerated in a chorus of violence and haste.
With his close-cropped beard and brooding manner, he comes off
too exclusively as an intellectual scapegoat, winningly tender
with his wife Portia (powerfully played by Kristin Flanders) but
less than plausible as the belligerent general at Philippi. His
skill is too much in bandying words--with Portia in Act II, with
Antony and Octavius before the climactic battle, with Cassius
in their petty spat the night before that--and too little in showing
he can also command those less utopian-minded than he.
Graham Winton's Mark Antony, by contrast,
has a thoughtful and nonbelligerent bearing that he turns to tremendous
advantage. With chilling ease, he moves with precision through
all the improbably instantaneous emotional shifts on which his
character's life depends--from sincere outrage after Caesar's
murder, to sincere respect when shaking hands with his killers,
to sincere irony in his famously manipulative speech to the crowd
at Caesar's funeral, to casual ruthlessness in assigning death-warrants
afterward. His face is anomalously kind and utterly remorseless,
like a consummate con man's, and only the still colder blood of
Octavius trips him up in the end: the opportunist par excellence
meets Opportunist Maximus and, expectably, is more Stoically bemused
than surprised or disappointed. The Rome of high-minded ideals
for which Brutus insisted Caesar died is clearly doomed no matter
who ends up in charge, a point Coonrod italicizes (deliberately,
I presume) by casting the weak, boyish, and diffident Michael
Ray Escamilla as the future emperor Octavius.
The price for all this lucid streamlining--and
yes, there is one--is differentiation. In their zeal to shorten
the text, the editors eliminated almost all specific characterization
of the Roman crowd, for instance. It's often said that Shakespeare
held "the mob" in contempt, but whatever the truth of that, he
knew how to make crowd members pivotal to his dramas, turning
fleeting cameos into gems of tiny portraiture (wholly lost here)
and revealing important distinctions among his aristocrats via
distinctions in their public speech (which partly depend on particularized
reactions). Shakespeare plants important political information
in his "mob" cameos--taking the temperature of the average worker,
for instance, on the question of whether Julius Caesar is truly
a danger to Roman society. Here, that information is attenuated
and blurred as depersonalized shouting from a sea of cloak-hoods.
Similarly, all the play's "outsider" characters--the
independent-minded Senator Cicero, the soothsayer at the opening,
the teacher of rhetoric Artemidorus, and the hapless poet Cinna
whom the crowd tears apart simply because he shares a name with
a conspirator--are played by a single actor. Curzon Dobell, dressed
less formally than the others in a knit cap and long black coat,
acts all these roles with the same slight slouch and vague expression
of distress, making little attempt to distinguish them. Coonrod's
point here seems to be that anyone who lacks class standing or
political backing but who presumes to speak with an individual
voice is so ineffectual that he might as well be lumped into one
barely noticeable person. An understandable trope for the media
age, perhaps, but the problems of speaking truth to power were
more nuanced for Shakespeare.
What Coonrod's production captures most
memorably is the desperate, bottomless cynicism of Julius
Caesar, which one intemperate scholar once likened to a malicious
"practical joke" played by the author on his audiences. Its vivid
and muscular language aside, the permanent viability of this play,
throughout the world, rests on the enduring paradox that we humans
are capable, at one and the same time, of being outraged at manipulative
political speech and of willingly surrendering to it. Demagoguery
wasn't any more news in Shakespeare's day, or Plutarch's, or Julius
Caesar's, than it is today, of course, yet the notion that both
benevolent and malevolent power rely on it--can't carry out their
policies without it--is permanently provocative because it casts
each one of us in a terrible light. Coonrod's Bush-whacking Julius
Caesar underlines that central question of whether the human animal
deserves democracy--which is obviously as unsettled on the eve
of Iraqi invasion as it was at the height of Elizabeth I's police
state.
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