James Shapiro’s Shakespeare

by Kirk Woodward

[Kirk’s an insatiable reader even in ordinary times, but the enforced leisure (if that’s even the right term) of the pandemic shut-down has given him time and the inclination to do more reading.  And thank goodness for that lagniappe.  The Max Beerbohm article he contributed to Rick On Theater on 2 November was the consequence of his having just read a book (or several, I’m not sure) on the man. 

[Now comes another guest-post Kirk drew from his reading.  He just finished four books by Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro and he’s composed a sort of book review of three Shakespeare volumes and one on the Passion Play of Oberammergau.  As you’ll see, Shapiro takes uncommon approaches to his Shakespeare studies; combined with Kirk’s own habitually unexpected perspective, “James Shapiro’s Shakespeare” will be a most interesting read, whether you’re a Bardolater or not.] 

Books of James Shapiro Discussed Below:

Oberammergau. Vintage Books, 2000.

A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. HarperCollins, 2005.

Contested Will. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2010.

The Year of Lear. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2015.

 *  *  *  *

The plays and life of William Shakespeare (1565-1616) are inexhaustible subjects, his plays because they are so numerous and so rich, his life because so little is known about it. One person who has done a great deal to close the gap between the two is the writer James Shapiro (b. 1955), who is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

I first became aware of Shapiro’s books inadvertently. Killing time while someone was completing house repairs, I glanced at a library shelf and saw a book called Oberammergau, aptly described as “The troubling story of the world’s most famous passion play.” I had no idea I owned this book and no idea where it came from.

Its subject is the famous play based on the New Testament’s gospel accounts which has been performed in the small town of Oberammergau, in Bavaria, Germany, roughly every decade for the last four centuries or so. Half the town’s citizens perform in the play, which was supposedly first created as a response to the plague, and by all accounts it can be quite stirring.

It has also been, throughout its history, horribly anti-Semitic, and the struggle to eliminate or at least mitigate those elements in the play is the subject of Shapiro’s book. He does a fine job of reporting, and he puts his finger on what seems to me to be the center of the problem it discusses:

For all the ecumenical attention to a shared spiritual heritage, the play forces Jews and Christians to face the painful fact that they read differently, and that a single version of the founding story of Christianity cannot be comfortably shared.

However true this may or may not be, and whether or not it is the last word on the subject, I was impressed by Shapiro’s thoughtfulness and his ability to put himself in many other people’s shoes. So I was delighted to have read the book.

Then, to my further surprise, I found another book by Shapiro on my shelves that I did not remember reading, much less owning, although since there is a bit of underlining in it I may have. That book is A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. Shapiro begins by making it clear that “we don’t know very much about what kind of friend or lover or person Shakespeare was.”

I can’t report what Shakespeare ate or drank or how he dressed, but I can establish some of the things he did this year [1599] that were crucial to his career, what he read and wrote, which actors and playwrights he worked with, and what was going on around him that fueled his imagination. . . . I hope to capture some of the unpredictable and contingent nature of daily life too often flattened out in historical and biographical works of greater sweep. . . . I end up focusing more on things that can be dated, such as political and literary events, rather than on more gradual and less perceptible historical shifts – though because Shakespeare’s plays are remarkably alert to many of these, I do my best to attend to them as well.

And he sensibly proposes to avoid “awkwardly littering the pages that follow with one hedge after another – ‘perhaps,’ ‘maybe,’ ‘it’s most likely,’ ‘probably,’ or the most desperate of them all, ‘surely . . . .’

And then we’re off, on the most interesting and exciting presentation of Shakespeare’s life that I’ve read, matched only in my reading by his follow-up book The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606.

The choices of 1599 and 1606 are not arbitrary. Although scholars differ on estimated dates for Shakespeare’s plays, Shapiro follows substantial scholarly opinion that 1599 saw the writing and/or first performances of Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet.

1606, in its turn, saw the advents of King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. It makes sense, as Shapiro tells the story, that these seven masterpieces arise in a period of notable, important, and often deeply upsetting events in the history of England and its neighbors Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. It was certainly a dramatic time.

1599 was the year in which Queen Elizabeth (1533-1603; reigned 1558-1603) tried to crush a ferocious rebellion in Ireland by sending there a reluctant Duke of Essex and an equally reluctant ad hoc army, with appalling results. Although Shapiro does not make this comparison, the Irish situation was basically England’s Vietnam War of its time.

The health of the Queen, nearing the exhausted end of her reign amid suspense about who would succeed her, was also on everyone’s mind. And nobles and citizens alike thought it likely that Spain would try to invade the country again (everyone thought they knew exactly when), as it had tried to do in the famous Great Armada of 1588.

1606 was even grimmer, introduced as it was by aftershocks from the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the King, Parliament, and most of the rest of the government, a scheme uncovered in late 1605. Although the plot did not succeed, the resulting panicked activity brings to mind an equivalent mood in the United States following the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Partly as a result of the Gunpowder Plot, Elizabeth’s successor, James I (1566-1625; reigned in England, 1603-25), found himself trying to balance political and religious disputes. And in the second half of the year, the situation was complicated by a serious outbreak of the plague.

Shapiro effectively draws us into these stories with detailed and vivid descriptions of events, so it’s hard not to feel we’re learning what it must have been like to be there. I have seen comments on these two books complaining that Shapiro spends too much time describing events like the Gunpowder Plot, as though his only intention were to give an historical narrative. I find these complaints off the mark for two reasons.

In the first place, Shapiro handles beautifully the historian’s dilemma – to concentrate on the great sweep of history, or on the experiences of the “common people” of the time. Shapiro gives us in detail both the objective side of events and the way they may have looked “at ground level,” at the level they would have manifested themselves to obscure but real people who were affected by them.

In the second place, the fact is that in both these years we don’t know much about Shakespeare except that he was writing and at least to some extent acting. Shapiro makes it clear that he doesn’t want to try to describe “what Shakespeare might have been thinking,” and he usually avoids it.

However, he can and does describe where Shakespeare would likely have been at the time of those events, and the results are revelatory.

To give one example, people sometimes wonder where Shakespeare got the impressions of court life that are so convincingly embodied in his plays. Shapiro provides multiple answers. He demonstrates that London was essentially a fairly small place, with a population of around 200,000. Shakespeare would have known members of the nobility.

And Shapiro makes it clear that as a member of the Chamberlain’s Men, and later of the King’s Men, Shakespeare would have been inside the royal palaces many times, often in close proximity to the sovereign.

Shakespeare saw plenty of court life at first hand. He would have known other notables of the time as well – for example, he and his family were uncomfortably close to the social circles of the Gunpowder plotters, a dangerous relationship at a fraught time.

Shapiro is not a breezy writer, but I found both these books engrossing, and I will certainly reread them. Meanwhile, I have not yet mentioned an even more important aspect of his approach: the light that it throws on Shakespeare’s plays themselves.

Shapiro does not claim that Shakespeare wrote any of the plays under discussion as a direct response to historical events. Playwrights who did, like Ben Jonson (1572-1637), whose satirical play Eastward Ho (1605) was considered by the government too satirical, found themselves in jail. Elizabethan England was not a permissive state, and neither was Jacobean England.

However, Shapiro does demonstrate that Shakespeare was attuned to the social and political events and currents of his time, and that he let them flow through his plays, not explicitly taking sides, but letting immediate circumstances influence his work.

I will sketch a few of his insights. Shapiro writes of Henry the Fifth that

Conquest, national identity, and mixed origins – the obsessive concerns of Elizabethan Irish policy – run deep through Henry the Fifth and sharply distinguish it from previous English accounts of Henry’s reign.  . . . Battlefield deaths have not gentled the condition of the [non-noble] anonymous soldiers who fought alongside Henry. . . . In the end this fraternal goodwill doesn’t cut across social lines.

Shapiro sees within Julius Caesar an ongoing discussion of censorship, an issue continually faced by playwrights of his time. “No play by Shakespeare explores censorship and silencing so deeply . . .” as terrifyingly illustrated by the death of Cinna the poet, and by the executions ordered after Caesar’s death.

The trends affecting As You Like It, as Shapiro presents them, have to do with increasing sophistication in the demands on playwrights by the times and the audiences. “Flat” characters like those of The Comedy of Errors (1592-1593?), and routine romances, would no longer do. In As You Like It, Shakespeare parodies, mimics, and overturns stereotypes of romantic love and conventional comedy, even (in the person of Rosalind) calling the idea of love itself into question.

Of Hamlet Shapiro writes

What the Chamberlain’s men did to the wooden frame of The Theatre [they tore it down and moved it], Shakespeare did to the old play of Hamlet [a version now lost, apparently written around 1587]: he tore it from its familiar moorings, salvaged its structure, and reassembled something new. By wrenching this increasingly outdated revenge play into the present Shakespeare forced his contemporaries to experience what he felt and what his play registers so profoundly: the world had changed. Old certainties were gone, even if new ones had not yet taken hold . . . Hamlet [is] a play poised midway between a religious past and a secular future.

In King Lear Shapiro sees those two same elements in conflict, and also identifies resonances with the impact of the Gunpowder Plot, the succession to the royal throne, King James’ desire to make England, Ireland, and Scotland into one nation (“Britain”—of which Wales was already part), the plague, and heated attitudes toward witchcraft, including the King’s own opinions.

Macbeth continues those themes. In it Shakespeare carefully walks a thin line of discussion about Scottish kings (James I, of course, was a Scot like Macbeth), their weaknesses, and their murders – a very sensitive topic. And, finally,

Any play about Antony and Cleopatra would have been seen as a reflection on the past regime as well as on the present one; it would also measure how much had altered in the political landscape during those seven years.

To this brief survey of the seven plays discussed in Shapiro’s two books can be added numerous examples of Shakespeare’s involvement with his own theater company, the Chamberlain’s (and later King’s) Men, and their theater, the Globe. These details help Shapiro answer an often-heard question: did William Shakespeare from Stratford actually write the plays attributed to him?

Shapiro approaches this question, in his book Contested Will, from an interesting angle. Although he discusses the authorship question, and to my mind settles it as well as it can be settled with the available evidence, his primary focus in the book is on why the question of authorship came up in the first place.

Shakespeare had been dead for about 200 years before the discussion began in earnest, and Shapiro asks what changed during that time. What made it a subject that people began to have opinions on? Shapiro provides fascinating answers. For example, how many of these assumptions do you share?

• Shakespeare is virtually a divinity in the world of art. He is in a world by himself. No one and nothing comes close.
• Shakespeare from Stratford was too involved in the world of commerce and business to have been the great artist that we see in the plays.
• The plays show a refinement and an awareness of exalted social circles, professional specialties, and foreign countries that an ordinary citizen from Stratford could never have had.
• Aristocrats, on the other hand, are refined and aware people (particularly the candidate for authorship that an individual has in mind).
• If Shakespeare were well known at the time, his life should have been better documented.
• The world Shakespeare lived in was essentially the same as ours in the way people lived.
• Writers always reveal themselves in their writing. All writing is essentially autobiographical.
• Personal events (for example, his father’s and son’s deaths) must have affected him in the way we assume they did.
• Shakespeare’s plays show him to be a champion of social justice/rebellion/the common people/the nobles/Protestants/Catholics/whatever else is important to the biographer.
• Shakespeare was basically a person a great deal like me (whoever the “I” is that is speaking).

Shapiro demonstrates that none of these assumptions would have applied, or had a factual basis, in Elizabethan and Jacobean times, and that it is a mistake to assume that people in Shakespeare’s time lived under the same circumstances that we do. Yet all these assumptions are crucial to the authorship debate. Start to question them, and the debate loses its punch.

For me the clincher to the authorship issue is, as Shapiro expresses it:

Whoever wrote these plays had an intimate, firsthand knowledge of everyone in the [acting] company, and must have been a shrewd judge of each actor’s talents. . . . It’s impossible to picture any . . . aristocrats or courtiers working as more or less equals with a string of lowly playwrights, especially with [George] Wilkins, who kept an inn and may have run a brothel.

Whoever wrote Shakespeare’s plays knew a lot of things, but he had inside knowledge of his own theater. The same conclusion, incidentally, is also inevitable after reading On Producing Shakespeare by Ronald Watkins (The Citadel Press, 1965).

Ultimately, it seems to me, the authorship controversy is really just a game, one that anyone can join, which is the source of the fun – but that’s all.

I called this article “James Shapiro’s Shakespeare” because the temptation for each of us, and for the many, many people who have written biographies of Shakespeare, is to see him as a person very much like ourselves - whoever we are.

Shapiro does not do this. He tells us that there are only so many known facts about Shakespeare, and that we have no idea if the plays and sonnets reflect states of his mind and experience (nor do they in the works of many other artists of his time and of ours).

Nevertheless Shapiro has gone remarkably far into the world Shakespeare lived in, dealing with what we can know, and he strikes me as a reliable and valuable guide.

[I have a personal take on the "who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays" debate.  It’s irrelevant to Shapiro’s book Contested Will (I kinda like that title) or Kirk’s précis of Shapiro’s discussion.  In fact, not only do I recognize that Shapiro’s not entering into the debate about who wrote the plays, but I think, from what I glean, I agree with his notions of why the debate exists.

[I also see that, as Kirk pointed out when I expressed the thought that follows, the debate “matters” because Shapiro’s response “extends not just to the Shakespeare authorship controversy, but to conspiracy theories like the Kennedy assassination, and from there on to Trump’s ‘fake news,’ etc.”

[Such as it is, however, the authorship question is a matter of interest only to litterateurs.  We theater people look on the whole issue as both silly and meaningless.  We don’t care.  (Okay, yes—I’m generalizing.) 

[The only thing about the plays that’s important to theater folk is that they exist.  Whoever wrote them, they’re wonderful and we’re blessed just to have them to act in, watch, and read.  Period.  End of argument.  Nothing else matters and is all just masturbatory.  IMHO, naturally—but I think you’ll find that most actors, directors, and others in the business of show will agree.]

Donald Julius Trump

As many readers will know, New York City’s Public Theater presented a production William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in Central Park earlier this spring (23 May-18 June, Delacorte Theater).  The  production became controversial and a lightning rod for harsh criticism and denunciation because director Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the house that Papp built, cast actor Gregg Henry, a tall man with blond hair, in the title role.  The production was played in modern dress, and Henry’s Caesar wore a dark blue suit with an over-long red tie, making him resemble Donald Trump.  As nearly everyone knows, in act three, scene  two of the play, Julius Caesar is stabbed to death in the Forum by a group of senators who fear he’s on the verge of becoming a tyrant, ending Rome’s republic and taking it to one-man rule.  It didn’t take much imagination to see that Eustis intended audiences to conflate the would-be tyrant who’s assassinated as our current president, Donald J. Trump, but protesters went further and proclaimed that the production, director, and theater wanted to see the actual president killed.

Following on Kathy Griffin’s execrable video performance this May in which she held up a prop severed head that looked like Trump, some people saw the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park as a step too far in its apparent expression of the director’s opinion of President Trump.  Many artists and others who make their lives in the arts have made it clear that they oppose this president and his government, including his arts policies as epitomized in his budget proposal, released in March, in which he revealed his intention not just to cut the appropriations to the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, but to eliminate their funding altogether.  No previous president has proposed a budget that goes that far, and people in the arts are both frightened and enraged.  (In my report on the 2017 Whitney Biennial, posted on 22 June, I quote from a statement on the museum’s website by Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney Museum’s director, directly linking the museum and the Biennial exhibit to this issue.) 

I referred to the Public Theater earlier as the house that Papp built, and I didn’t do that just because Joseph Papp did, indeed, launch what was long known as the New York Shakespeare Festival, the company that became the Public Theater sometime after Papp’s 1991 death.  (For several years in between, it was known as the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Theater.)  I intended to make a connection with the man who, in 1990 rejected a $50,000 NEA grant rather than sign an anti-obscenity “loyalty oath” that he saw as “an abuse of the fundamental ethic in artistic endeavor.”  Papp considered the proposed restrictions to his “freedom,” his “privileged right to make my own judgment” according to “principle, taste and artistic standards” to be “unthinkable, if not downright subversive.”  That set the standard and eventually other heads of important arts organizations followed Papp’s lead and, despite the great need for the grant money, which was vital in some cases, turned down NEA cash as long as it came with strings attached.  Oskar Eustis, standing as he is on his predecessor’s shoulders—and in his shadow—is in a similar position.  He, too, has stood his ground.

I have often acknowledged on this blog that I am just about a First Amendment absolutist.  Except under the most extraordinary circumstances—incitement to violence, slander or libel, falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater, for instance—I do not believe in censoring any speech or artistic expression.  I fiercely believe that the only proper response to speech (including symbolic speech such as visual art) you don’t like is more speech.  The only proper response.  (By the way, that doesn’t mean shouting someone down.  That’s just a verbal form of censorship.)  I have written about this often: “The First Amendment & The Arts,” 8 May 2010; “Culture War,” 6 February 2014; “The First Amendment & The Arts, Redux,” 13 February 2015.  I said so again as recently as last Thursday in my post on the Whitney Biennial which confronted a controversy over a work of art on display.  Let me state my position on this matter by quoting a line from Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards’s musical 1776.  The character is Stephen Hopkins, the irascible delegate to the Continental Congress from Connecticut: “Well, I’ll tell y’—in all my years I never heard, seen, nor smelled an issue that was so dangerous it couldn’t be talked about. . . .  Hell yes, I’m for debatin’ anything . . . !”  You debate people when you don’t like what they’re saying, you don’t shut them down.

In February 2006, the New York Theatre Workshop announced a production of Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner’s controversial, pro-Palestinian documentary play, My Name Is Rachel Corrie, to run from 22 March to 14 April 2006.  After protests from Jewish groups and threats to withdraw financial support by contributors to NYTW, however, the theater decided to “postpone indefinitely” the production in order to set up some “context” for the performance (read: schedule defensive panels and other counter-events).  Rickman and Viner denounced the decision and withdrew the play.  Many First Amendment advocates and free-speech activists, as well as prominent members of the worldwide theater and arts community such as Vanessa Redgrave, Harold Pinter, and Tony Kushner, viewed the NYTW decision as a capitulation to blackmail and an acquiescence to censorship.  NYTW never reinstated the production, which would have been the U.S. première, and Rachel Corrie ultimately had a commercial Off-Broadway run at the Minetta Lane Theatre from 15 October to 17 December 2006.

In 1999, after the opening of Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (2 October 1999-9 January 2000), then-New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and other critics publicly denounced one work in the exhibit, The Holy Virgin Mary by Chris Ofili, declaring it anti-Catholic because the artist used elephant dung among his media.  Despite the explanations of Ofili, a British artist of Nigerian heritage, that the painting was a homage because elephant dung in his African culture is considered sacred, Giuliani and his supporters unsuccessfully tried to close Sensation and then moved to have the museum evicted from its city-owned building.  BMA stood its ground and won its fight for freedom of expression in court. 

                                                                                                 

In May 1998, the Manhattan Theatre Club momentarily caved under threats of violence and yanked their production of Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi, his contemporary retelling of Jesus’ birth, ministry, and death in which Jesus and his disciples are all depicted as gay.  The play, which no one had actually seen or even read at this time (it wasn’t even finished), was assailed by conservative Christians and others as blasphemous and MTC suffered a vehement protest campaign that led to bomb threats at the theater and threats of death to the theater’s staff and the production’s company which nearly succeeded in canceling the play’s world première.  (One caller left this message on MTC’s voice-mail: “Again, message is for Jew guilty homosexual Terrence McNally.  Because of you we will exterminate every member of the theater and burn the place to the ground.  This is a message from National Security Movement of America.  Death to the Jews Worldwide.”  McNally is, it might be worth noting, gay, but he’s Catholic, not Jewish.)  Once again, free-speech advocates chastised the theater for bowing to pressure, with figures like playwrights Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, David Henry Hwang, and Larry Kramer publicly excoriating the theater for its action; Emily Mann, a playwright and the director of Princeton, New Jersey’s McCarter Theatre, also denounced the cancellation.  Athol Fugard withdrew his play The Captain’s Tiger from the company’s schedule while other theaters stepped up to offer the play a stage.  A week after announcing the cancellation, MTC reinstated the production.  Similar protests arose wherever McNally’s play was produced, from professional regional stagings, to college productions, to community-theater presentations; when the 1999 London première was staged, a British imam issued a fatwa against McNally.

The protests against the Public’s production of Julius Caesar at first just succeeded in driving away two major sponsors, Delta Air Lines and Bank of America; Delta actually severed its longtime association with the theater as “the official airline of the Public Theater” while BoA merely dropped its support of the Shakespeare in the Park production.  That  lasted until outlets like Breitbart and Fox News got a hold of the story and geed up a frenzy of manufactured outrage.  Then threats and insults of one kind or another started to be hurled at the Public and Eustis, including the demand that the play be taken off the stage.  That seems to be the standard demand these days for a work of art some people don’t like: remove it from public view. 

That painting at the Whitney Museum I mentioned earlier, Dana Schutz’s Open Casket, a rendering of Emmett Till’s mangled body at his funeral—the protesters wanted it removed from the Biennial; in 2010, Smithsonian Institution Secretary G. Wayne Clough ordered the removal of David Wojnarowicz’s video A Fire in My Belly from the National Portrait Gallery’s Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture in the face of protests (once again on the grounds of blasphemy); this past May, Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center removed artist Sam Durant’s sculpture Scaffold, which referenced the hanging of 38 Dakota Indian men in 1862 by the United States Army, from the June reopening exhibit in its Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in response to demands by Native American groups.  The problem with these efforts is that, while no one forces anyone to see an offending work of art, censoring it prevents everyone from seeing it.

But removal hasn’t been sufficient remedy for the aggrieved parties.  Protesters wanted both Open Casket and Scaffold destroyed, though only the Durant sculpture was actually dismantled and burned.  (The Whitney refused to remove Schutz’s painting from the Biennial.)  I find this problematical beyond the act of censorship the removal demand represents: it smacks of book burning, one of the most heinous acts against human thought anyone can commit.  It’s the province of totalitarian governments like the fictional one in Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 and the very real one in Nazi Germany.  The puritanical priest-prophet of 15th century Florence, Girolamo Savonarola, burned books he deemed “immoral”—a judgment of which he, alone, was the final arbiter.  Modern-day dictators and would-be dictators like Augusto Pinochet in Chile in the ’70s and Bosnian Serb nationalist leader Ratko Mladić in the ’90s burned books of their enemies and opponents.  The Taliban and Isis burn books and destroy art works and cultural treasures of which they disapprove.   This is the line into which protesters in our own democracy fit when they demand the removal and destruction of paintings and sculptures which they claim harm or distress them.

Like the Corpus Christi protests, warnings of death and other assaults were phoned into Eustis’s home, targeted at him, his wife, and his daughter.  One call, picked up by Eustis’s 26-year-old daughter, threatened, “I want to grab you by the pussy”—a clear evocation of Trump’s offensive “locker-room talk” during the campaign.  “Your husband wants Trump to die. I want him to die.”  (This kind of verbal assault spilled over to other theaters around the country unconnected to either the Public or the Julius Caesar production.  Whether this is a case of tarring all theaters with the same brush or ignorance on the part of the callers isn’t clear.  Considering the spelling in some of the e-mails, I’m inclined to go with the latter.)  At the final performances of the play, activists invaded the stage at the Delacorte Theater or shouted from the audience:  “Goebbels would be proud,” yelled one protester, referring to the Nazi propaganda minister of the Third Reich, on the closing performance on Sunday, 18 June, as he stormed the stage.     

In a statement published by the theater, Eustis affirmed:

We recognize that our interpretation of the play has provoked heated discussion; audiences, sponsors and supporters have expressed varying viewpoints and opinions.  Such discussion is exactly the goal of our civically-engaged theater; this discourse is the basis of a healthy democracy.

Our production of “Julius Caesar” in no way advocates violence towards anyone.  Shakespeare’s play, and our production, make the opposite point: those who attempt to defend democracy by undemocratic means pay a terrible price and destroy the very thing they are fighting to save.  For over 400 years, Shakespeare’s play has told this story and we are proud to be telling it again in Central Park.

In an interview with Michael Paulson of the New York Times, the Public’s artistic director asserted:

Those thousands of people who are calling our corporate sponsors to complain about this—none of them have seen the show.  They’re not interested in seeing the show.  They haven’t read “Julius Caesar.”  They are being manipulated by “Fox & Friends” and other news sources, which are deliberately, for their own gain, trying to rile people up and turn them against an imagined enemy, which we are not.

The director pointed out that five years ago, director Rob Melrose staged a production of Julius Caesar for the Public that had an Obama-like Caesar.  “That production played all over the country,” said Eustis.  “Not one peep from anybody.”  Furthermore, he insisted when asked “Is Trump Caesar?”: “Of course not.  Julius Caesar is Julius Caesar.”

What we are doing is what we try and do in every production, which is make the dramatic stakes as real and powerful for contemporary people as we can, in our time and our place.

Eustis acknowledged, “This production makes some fun of him”—as it does of “this president or any other president.”  The director made public statements reminding people that Shakespeare’s play does not support the assassination and, in fact, warns audiences that violence is no way to preserve democracy.  Indeed, Julius Caesar’s death precipitates the very danger the conspirators were trying to avert when Caesar’s nephew, Octavius, seizes power as Augustus Caesar and the Roman republic becomes an empire.  “This production does not hate Julius Caesar,” averred Eustis, ending his comments by stating firmly and unequivocally: “This production is horrified at his murder.”

But all this was to little avail.  The opponents to the Public’s production of Julius Caesar had gotten up a head of steam and it seemed nothing could stop them.  After the 14 June attack on Republican congressional baseball players in Virginia that left Steve Scalise, a representative from Louisiana, gravely wounded, Donald Trump, Jr., appeared to link the shooting with the performance at  the Public.  He also tweeted: “Serious question, when does ‘art’ become political speech & does that change things?”  I guess he doesn’t know that it’s irrelevant since political speech, just like artistic expression, is also protected under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution—so, no, it doesn’t change things. 

That’s the rub, isn’t it?  Art people like Donald Trump, Senior or Junior, can ignore—it’s meaningless to them (unless it’s a portrait of the Donald he can charge off to his foundation). That’s why President Trump can blithely propose to  zero out the miniscule government support for the arts this country parsimoniously and grudgingly provides.  In terms of the national budget, it’s insignificant—but it’s annoying, like a fly buzzing around in the Oval Office.  Those pesky artists!

But let it turn political or socially conscious . . . .  Whoa, Nelly!  Then we got trouble.  Because art can make people listen—and, more dangerously, it can make them think.  Vaclav Havel’s plays made a generation of Westerners think about the Soviet communist domination of Eastern Europe and what that made life like there.  Athol Fugard made people see apartheid the way South Africans saw it day to day, and it was painful and ugly.  Their art traveled the way no history book, essay, or political lecture could.  It touched people.  Larry Kramer’s plays and David Wojnarowicz’s paintings and sculptures made people look at what gay life and the AIDS crisis was like for the people living inside it.  Turn that kind of spotlight on an American politician or a political philosophy or a proposed policy and something might happen.  Better put the kibosh on that, double quick!  Can’t let that imp out of the bottle.

But the Constitution won’t allow adversaries to censor it.  They can try to go after the financial support for the art or the art’s presenters—that’s what the opponents to My Name Is Rachel Corrie did—and it worked for a while.  The challengers to the Public’s Julius Caesar took aim at that, too, but it didn’t succeed this time—and, as far as I’m concerned, Delta and BoA looked craven for buckling.  So the forces who don’t want to see art of which they disapprove and don’t want others to see it, either, fall back on the last resort of the fearful: violence—or the threat of violence.  The Manhattan Theatre Club turned tail and ran in the face of that, but found their courage again when they were assailed by their own constituency—theater artists.  Oskar Eustis and the Public, true to the spirit of Joe Papp, stood up to the scare tactics and prevailed. 

Forgetting for the moment that the Public’s Julius Caesar was never advocating assassination—not of Caesar nor of Trump—the real message of the production, the warning that William Shakespeare was sending and that director Eustis made contemporary and relevant, is one we all have to hear, and hear again, and hear often.  And, yes, it is political—not partisan politics, or the “intrigue or maneuvering within a political unit or a group in order to gain control or power,” as the American Heritage Dictionary defines it-—which is what Little Trump meant (because it’s the only kind he or his ilk knows about, I imagine), but “the art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation, and the administration and control of its internal and external affairs”—a bigger, more august matter.  In that context, we must heed the advice of Walter Lippmann from his 1939 essay “The Indispensable Opposition” (I’ve republished the entire essay on Rick On Theater, and I strongly recommend everyone read it—http://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2011/11/indispensable-opposition.html.):

We take, it seems to me, a naïvely self-righteous view when we argue as if the right of our opponents to speak were something that we protect because we are magnanimous, noble, and unselfish.   The compelling reason why, if liberty of opinion did not exist, we should have to invent it, why it will eventually have to be restored in all civilized countries where it is now suppressed, is that we must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.

Like it or not, we have to hear what the people we disagree with say.  Doing politics in an echo chamber, which has become the practice for too many politicians in this country for too long, is dangerous—not to mention just plain counterproductive.  Donald Trump doesn’t think he does, and he doesn’t like to, but he, most of all, has to hear what opponents and critics have to say.  Lippmann’s analogy is most apt: He likens listening to our opponents to paying a doctor “to ask us the most embarrassing questions and to prescribe the most disagreeable diet.”  We recognize, Lippmann held, “that if we threaten to put the doctor in jail because we do not like the diagnosis and the prescription it will be unpleasant for the doctor, to be sure, but equally unpleasant for our own stomachache.”

For this reason, the Public Theater’s Julius Caesar, Sam Durant’s Scaffold, David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly, Dana Schutz’s Open Casket, Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi, Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner’s My Name Is Rachel Corrie, and Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary, all must be seen and heard—and considered before being dismissed.  They and other works like them, no matter how painful (like some medical treatments) or distressing they are, must never be suppressed, removed, silenced, or destroyed.  We owe it to ourselves to hear what they have to say.  We owe it to ourselves.

'Julius Caesar' (Donmar Warehouse)

I hadn’t been to St. Ann’s Warehouse in DUMBO since March 2012 when I saw the Wooster Group-New York City Players collaboration, Eugene O’Neill’s Early Plays, but on Friday evening, 4 October, my frequent theater companion, Diana, and I drove over the Manhattan Bridge to see the U.S. première of Donmar Warehouse’s all-female Julius Caesar, which opens St. Ann’s 2013-14 season.  (Early Plays, reported on ROT on 14 March 2012, was presented in St. Ann’s previous location on Water Street, its home since 2000.  The theater moved to Jay Street later in 2012 and will move again to new, permanent digs back on Water Street in 2015.)  Scheduled to run through 3 November, the Brooklyn production began previews on 3 October and opened on 9 October.  Directed by Phyllida Lloyd, Shakespeare’s play was presented in London from November 2012 to February 2013.  Most of the London cast remains with the New York staging, including Harriet Walter (as Brutus), who appeared as Queen Elizabeth I in Lloyd’s production of Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart in 2009 (see my report on ROT, 22 June 2009).

Lloyd has reset the Roman forum to a women’s prison where the inmates and guards perform the drama of power, murder, and betrayal.  According to Donmar’s publicity, Lloyd believes that the play’s impact is enhanced “by the backdrop of female incarceration, a live thrash metal band, and the emotional nuances inherent to women playing men at their most vulnerable.”  For the International Herald Tribune review of the London performance, Matt Wolf described the presentation as “belligerently high-concept.” 

A fair amount of the advanced press coverage has been focused on the gyno-centric nature of the cast.  Most make the point that there have always been lots of all-male Shakespearean productions, including the Globe Theatre renditions of Twelfth Night  and Richard III (both in 2012), which will open in rep on Broadway in November.  Of course, almost all the coverage has mentioned that in Elizabethan times, all of Shakespeare’s female characters were played by males—usually boys—and no women were permitted on stage (Shakespeare in Love notwithstanding) until the tradition was imported from France and the Continent after the Restoration in 1660.  (The existential trick comes when those women-played-by-males disguise themselves as men, a frequent conceit in Shakespeare: consider Viola in Twelfth Night and Imogen in Cymbeline, among others.)  Lloyd’s Julius Caesar, which started life the year Josie Rourke was appointed the first female artistic director of Donmar Warehouse, is by way of turn-about.  Note has been taken, too, that women playing male Shakespearean characters is itself an old tradition, including Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet in 1899 and more recently, Fiona Shaw’s Richard II in 1995 at the National and Vanessa Redgrave’s Prospero at the Globe in 2000.  (In this country, Sarah Siddons performed Hamlet in 1775 and in 1983, Diane Venora played the role for Joseph Papp.  In 1837, Charlotte Cushman played Romeo in Albany to her sister’s Juliet.)  Last June and July, another Julius Caesar on stage in New York City, the Smith Street Stage’s modern-dress production in Carroll Park, Brooklyn, presented a Julius Caesar not only performed by a woman but as a woman (still named Julius); Trebonius and Cicero, were also played as females. In the performance at St. Ann’s, the female prisoners are all playing men. 

St. Ann’s artistic director, Susan Feldman, said at first she thought the all-female concept “would be gimmicky”—until she saw a performance.  Arguments supporting Lloyd’s interpretation range from combating the dearth of juicy roles for women, especially in the classics, to balancing the scales for all the men-as-women productions, to female empowerment (all those women with weapons and power!).  At least one theater writer, Tim Walker of The Telegraph, declared, “[W]hat a load of old tosh it all is.”  (For the Brit-deficient, ‘tosh’ is what our English cousins say when they mean ‘crock of shit.’)  He went on to spit out, “Shakespeare never, after all, believed that a single word he wrote would ever be uttered upon a stage by a woman . . .” and ultimately laid the blame for his dismay on Lloyd: “It is an absurd contrivance which serves only to demonstrate quite how imprisoned the director is by a patently daft idea, if not also her political correctness and vanity.”  To add insult to injury, Walker made a point of praising the Globe’s two all-male productions, calling them “classy, respectful and hugely entertaining.”  (The Telegraph was apparently so aggrieved by the production that it ran three negative reviews.)

The Donmar company seems to have espoused the rationale that the production gives women chances to do the kind or meaty and substantial parts usually reserved for men.  “It's not just about employment in the theater,” says Rourke.  “It's about hearing women's voices at the center of things, literally giving them roles to play in life and art.”  Lloyd asserts that this Julius Caesar gives the actresses opportunities to play roles other than “the love interest, the tyrant’s wife, the tyrant’s mistress,” and Frances Barber, Caesar at St. Ann’s, feels that the director “wanted us to get rid absolutely of any sort of frilly, female, wily, seductressy nonsense.”   “I find myself playing a lot of wives and girlfriends,” says Jenny Jules, the production’s Cassius, “or parts that support the men's meat-and-potatoes roles."  Jules continues: "It's really fantastic to just be given the chance to chomp on somebody like Cassius. . . .  If, as a woman, I have been allowed to be aggressive or confrontational or violent on stage, the character is always thought of as the villainess.“  And Cush Jumbo, who plays Mark Antony, adds that “you have to be the soundboard of your own work.  You have to balance things out carefully so as not to offend; you feel you can't go too far one way or the other.”  The production’s Brutus, Harriet Walter, had felt that her Shakespearean days were behind her because of the lack of strong female parts.  “Once I’d played Cleopatra,” Walter explains,  “I thought, ‘Now what can I do?’ Because any other female role I was offered in the Shakespeare canon was going to be inferior and less demanding. There was a certain logic to then turn to the male repertory.”  Lloyd, however, also takes up the empowerment argument: “We’re on a mission to inspire women to find their voices.”  Her aim is to “to make young women in the audience feel they are potentially part of not just the romantic and the domestic, but that they could be at the center of the political sphere.”  Says Lloyd, “I wanted to celebrate the first time that a woman got the reins of what we would call a ‘big hitter’ in London theater.”  

Obviously, I can’t speak much to Lloyd’s last point, but I recognize the first ones.  Back in the ’70s and ’80s, African-American actors were making similar arguments for color-blind casting in classical plays because so many talented and well-trained actors weren’t getting the opportunities to play these great roles.  While it was fine to take a white actor and smear him with blackface so he could play Othello (Laurence Olivier, famously), why wasn’t it okay to cast a black actor as, say, Iago?  (In fact, I saw a very interesting staging of Othello in Washington with Avery Brooks as the Moor and Andre Braugher as his Ancient.  And last April, the Royal Shakespeare Company brought its 2012 production of Julius Caesar, which director Gregory Doran relocated to contemporary Africa with an all-black cast, to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.)  Color-blind casting may be a little easier to finesse than gender-blind, but the point is still the same.  It only remains, as far as I’m concerned, how well the director conceives the transformation and how well the company executes it.  But, with Tom Walker’s response in mind, I would never reject the concept: if Portia can stand before a Venetian court and argue that “The quality of mercy is not strained” in drag, then I can’t see denying a Redgrave, a Shaw, or a Walter the chance to stand on a stage and pronounce the great (male) speeches of the Bard.  (I’ve written on ROT on the subject of “non-traditional casting.”  See my post on 20 December 2009.)

So, before I assess how well I think Lloyd and the Donmar troupe executed their idea—or how well that idea itself worked on the St. Ann’s stage (well, performance space: there’s not really a stage per se)—let me try to describe the production.  It’s an integral part of the concept of the show.  First, you’ve read that the play is set in a woman’s prison—but that’s not entirely accurate.  This is a production of Julius Caesar by a group of inmates and the “set” (designed by Bunny Christie) is their common room (or whatever you’d call it), a large open space at the back of which is a wall with a garage-type door slightly stage right of center, a glassed-in booth with closed-circuit TV monitors stage left for the guards to survey the cell block (it also serves as the tech booth and the techies are costumed as guards, too), and a split-level catwalk with a metal railing that’s about seven feet up on stage right and maybe 10 or 12 feet high on the left; there’s a flight of metal stairs connecting the two levels.  The space, which has a bare cement floor, is set up like a proscenium stage with the spectators in steep metal risers across the front of the acting area.  There are two concrete columns just in front of the risers, the stage right one of which is occasionally used as a sort of crow’s nest.  The rest of the set is made up of whatever furniture and detritus lie about the space, found objects as it were, mostly odd chairs, a table or two, and porn mags. 

The inmate company—we don’t learn who produced or directed the diegetic performance, one of the prisoners, a prison staffer, or some outside contractor—seems somehow to have come up with makeshift costume pieces such as great coats, berets, and ski masks to cover their gray prison sweats, as well as props like red rubber gloves (to represent the bloody hands of the conspirators), a paper Burger King crown, knives (stand-ins for Shakespeare’s swords), and rifles and pistols (all harmless fakes, obviously).  (No credit is listed for the costumes, though they were apparently put together by designer Christie; the fights were choreographed by Kate Waters and the movement director was Ann Yee.)  The lighting is harsh and white, as if from fluorescents or floods (though, to be sure, it was subtly designed by Neil Austin for appropriate theatrical effects without violating the conceit) and the sound, including the heavy metal band on a rolling platform, is loud and unmodulated in the hard-surfaced, undampened room.  (The sound was designed by Tom Gibbons and the music composed by Gary Yershon.)

The audience, which had been waiting in the Brooklyn Roasting Company, a coffee-roasting business next door, enters through the garage doors on Jay Street, herded and monitored by guards (starting with the only two males in the company, who I think are either actual security guards or members of the St. Ann’s staff as they merely checked tickets and ushered us into the holding area, which looks like a loading dock.  (St. Ann’s new theater was formerly a furniture warehouse.)  There a squad of female guards warns us of the rules for prison visitors, our assigned role; hands out a list of “Visiting Information” (“If in an emergency you need to leave your seat, a prison officer will be present to escort you out.  Please be aware there is NO re-admission”); and barks instructions at us.  A second garage door opens on the platform at the other end of the loading dock, and we’re marshaled up the steps and into the performance area. The performance, it’s clear, has already begun. 

Once we’re seated—the spectators are herded over from the coffee business in two groups and the metal garage doors are opened and closed for each group, like passengers on a space ship passing through an airlock—the actors are escorted in through the inner garage door by a squad of officers who depart before the action starts.  This is a kind of environmental performance because, even though the actors use only the “stage” area, the whole room is part of the performance environment since we spectators are designated characters in the production. 

The play-within-the play, once it’s started, for the most part continues without the prison envelope leaking in directly.  There’s a modern-language preamble in which Mark Antony (Cush Jumbo) and her fellow inmates, wearing paper masks with Caesar’s (that is, Barber’s) face, participate in what Huffington Post’s Michael Giltz calls “a rousing bacchanal” set to punk-rock music (one on-line reviewer identifies the song as “a punk karaoke version of Jackie DeShannon's “When You Walk in the Room,” but I didn’t recognize it) that was an evocation of Caesar’s triumphant return to Rome.  Then, in the scene in which Caesar is killed, one member of the audience—it was a man the night I saw the show—is selected to come down and sit in one of the chairs occupied by the senator-assassins.  His only role is that of observer or witness and after the assassination, he’s escorted back to his seat.  (I’m not sure what the point of that is, however.)  More significantly, when Cinna the Poet appears, the actress portraying him is suddenly called out by an officer and another inmate (Helen Cripps) is pushed forward, a script thrust into her hands, and Julius Caesar continues.  A few moments later, when the crowd attacks the poet as a stand-in for Cinna the conspirator (Meline Danielewicz), the violence becomes more “real” than playacting—“Ow, that fuck ing hurt!” yells the jailbird—and the guards come rushing in to break up the assault.  Nonetheless, the atmosphere of the jail, in the terms of the popular imagination (consider Oz, Prison Break, or any such depiction), permeates the whole production, both the outer one and the diegetic one—which isn’t really surprising since we’re sitting in the set.

Now, I have to report that I was sorely disappointed in the whole proceeding.  A while ago (18 September 2009), I published an article on ROT called “Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage” in which I discussed the simile production, an interpretation of classic plays that “simply shifts the time or location to an analogous one nearer our own,” and the metaphorical kind that “examines the play from the inside, ‘generating provocative theatrical images . . . that are suggestive of the play rather than specific, reverberant rather than concrete.’”  (My article was based on Robert Brustein’s “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?” in the New York Times, which I republished on the blog on 10 March 2011.)  I put Lloyd’s version of Julius Caesar at the “the prosaic simile” end of the continuum, some distance from “the poetic metaphor.”  To be frank, it all seemed to me like “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

I can well understand the impulse to let women inhabit those powerful male characters and get to speak those stirring words.  I have no fundamental objection to resetting a classic play, as I revealed in “Similes, Metaphors.”   So, what went awry, in my estimation, with Donmar’s Julius Caesar?  As I see it, three failings help keep this from being a good theater experience: the company’s philosophy or rationale, the production concept, and the physical production.  I’ll start with what did work for me, however: the acting.

The JC ensemble is mixed as far as experience and classical background is concerned.  Some, like Walter, who was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2011, and Barber, have done all the major female Shakespearean roles and other classic parts; others are just starting out in their careers and have done mostly contemporary plays and film or TV roles.  Nonetheless, the company handled the characters well, not to mention the poetry.  If you add in the conceit that the actors are all playing prison inmates who are putting on a Shakespeare play, they come off even better because it lends an element of innate tension, violence, and anger to that of the Shakespearean story.  There’s no issue with the cast managing these male roles.  That’s especially true since the actresses aren’t pretending to be men, even if they’re not turning the male characters into women (as the other Brooklyn production of JC did).  I had no trouble accepting Walter as a strong, upright person with sincere beliefs and concerns but simultaneous doubts and insecurities about the severity of the actions he’s forced to take.  Walter is forthright and, while a commanding stage presence, thoughtful and occasionally uncertain.  Barber, by contrast, is more the gang leader, the warlord.  She’s shorter than Walter and, in the trench coat and beret, presents a square figure, solid and inflexible—what New York Timesman Ben Brantley describes as “the butchest of them all.”  (In fact, Barber’s stage image reminded me a lot of Boris Badenov, the Pottsylvanian spy character in the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon series of the 1960s, but without the accent—or the mustache.  Sorry—I know I’m a geezer.  What can I say?)  Barber exudes Caesar’s self-confidence (he defies the “Ides of March” warning, for instance) and innate cruelty (he force-feeds Jenny Jules’s Cassius a donut just because he looks suspiciously “lean and hungry”), but comes off as somewhat one-notish for the portion of the play in which the character appears.

In the final analysis, however, I found I was only mildly taken by Lloyd’s rationale for mounting this interpretation.  Yes, I know that actresses are given short shrift when it comes to the juicy roles in the classics.  In his review of the production, Brantley called Julius Caesar “one of Shakespeare’s most manly tragedies,” and someone did a count showing that the word ‘men’ comes up 54 times in JC and ‘women’ gets only four mentions.  But that’s not a revelation, and the perceived need to redress it isn’t a new phenomenon, either.  It seems to me that far too much emphasis has been placed on the rationale for doing this all-woman staging when all that’s really necessary is just to do it—and spend all the effort and focus on making the production’s point—the one about power, control, resentment, and repression.  I believe we’ll get the idea about female empowerment, both from a social and a theatrical standpoint.  Audiences aren’t really that benighted, though some directors and producers like to think we are.  (I wrote a post called “To Note, Or Not To Note” in which I made this point; see ROT on 28 August 2009.)  Do the show, I say; let the socio-political point fend for itself.

There’s a problem inherent in Lloyd’s fundamental premise, however.  She chose to do the play with women playing men: the characters are still men doing all that power-wielding and saber-rattling.  Diana suggested it might have been more interesting if the characters were the women inmates—a sort of West Side Story with JC as Leonard Bernstein, et al., did with Romeo and Juliet: turn the Roman men into contemporary female prisoners, say one jailhouse gang (led by Caesar and then Mark Antony) fighting another (commanded by Brutus and his crew) for dominance in the yard.  I’d need more time to think that out, but it would accomplish one thing this interpretation could use: putting the actual women, rather than women portraying men, in the positions of strength and control.  That’s the point of the exercise, as I understand it—along with the artistic one of letting actresses speak those magnificent lines.  (To be precise, the actresses at St. Ann’s aren’t really playing the men of Julius Caesar.  They’re playing female convicts who are playing the Shakespearean parts.  But we never learn who the prisoners are or what they want from this experience.  They’re not really there.)  I said this cast handled the powerful poetry excellently, but whoa!—how magnificent would it have been if actresses like Walter, Barber, Jules, and Jumbo got to bust loose on the roles themselves, too?  I’d pay to see that!  As it is, there are actresses saying the words—but not women.  It would take a lot more thought to create such a metaphorical adaptation than Lloyd’s simile production requires.  The first concept would be a more complex reconsideration than the second, which requires really nothing more than casting and a little costuming.  Lloyd’s version of the play doesn’t so much empower women as simply provide an opportunity for non-traditional casting.  That’s a nice goal, righteous and worthy on its own, but it doesn’t do what Lloyd’s troupe says their goal is and what Donmar’s and St. Ann’s publicity proclaims the show’s all about.

Now, I’ve gleaned from other cultural evidence (TV and movies, for instance) that social upheavals seem to come to the fore in Britain some years after they hit here.  British society, at least in its TV incarnation, went through the issues of racism long after they’d become familiar subjects of treatment in our cultural media, and the same with feminism and women’s issues.  (By the time Prime Suspect hit British TV, the idea of a female police detective with rank was no longer a new idea on U.S. sets.  We’d already done Cagney & Lacey, not to mention Police Woman, and female lieutenants and captains were already presences in TV cop shops here.  If Helen Mirren hadn’t been so good and the show overall so well made, they wouldn’t have gotten much notice.  The gender politics in the series seemed so settled to me that when it came up, it felt absolutely retro.)  I’m not saying that the problems have all been resolved.  Of course they haven’t; and we still have sexism, not to mention racism, in even official situations where you’d think it was long passé.  But as a selling point—‘We’re going to expose sexism and gender bias in the theater and strike a blow for women’s equality!’—just isn’t going to move me much.  I mean, didn’t we do that 30 years ago?  Not solve it, but make it an issue?  My consciousness has been raised, people! 

Of course, I’m not saying don’t do the show.  I’m saying don’t sell it on the basis of the contemporary (your contemporary) politics.  Focus on the play’s politics, Shakespeare’s politics.  If you do your jobs well, the politics will take care of itself—you’ll make your argument.  And, what’s more, I’ll get to come out of the show thinking, ‘Hey, they made a good point.  That’s right, too—and it’s still happening, isn’t it.’  I’ll feel like I worked something out without being led by the nose.  But tell me ahead of time, beat it into me that that’s what you’re up to, I’ll do what I’ve done now: come out of the theater (or, really, sit in it as the play’s unfolding) and say, ‘Okay, but I know all this—it’s the 21st century, for goodness’ sake.  You could say it in a sentence and it’d be just as revelatory as all this mishegoss.’ 

This disappointment with the context for the production was exacerbated by the discomfort generated by the physical set-up.  I already said the production is loud—the cement-and-metal room reverberates—and the heavy metal thrash music adds to this condition.  The actors all speak at top volume, though I’m sure there’s a rationale for that (prisons are loud places, men in combat shout a lot, and so on).  St. Ann’s molded plastic seats are hard (and I’m more than a touch arthritic; I said I was a geezer, remember), so prolonged sitting in a stiff, hard seat isn’t the greatest of pleasures for me.  Furthermore, the performance is two hours long without an intermission—no chance to unkink the joints or stretch what pass for muscles.  (There’s a practical reason most intermissionless shows are 90 minutes or less.)  Finally, the space isn’t air-conditioned and the heat builds up in the enclosed, concrete room with thousands of watts of stage lighting burning for a couple of hours.  Within minutes, sweat was dripping down my face and rolling down the back of my neck.  Ick!  (According to one of the Donmar performers acting as a guard when we were leaving, the company doesn’t usually perform in the warm season, but no one expected early October in New York City to be so August-like.  St. Ann’s does have air-conditioning—they turned it on after the play was over—but it’s an industrial system that makes a racket too loud for actors to project over the noise.)  By the time the performance was over, I was so anxious just to stand up, much less leave the room, that I’d begun to phase the play out.  Now, that’s clearly counterproductive.  (I confess that I feel uncomfortable letting physical discomfort affect my response to a theater performance, but I suspect that had I been engaged by the art more, the conditions in the auditorium wouldn’t have weighed so heavily on me.  It’s something of a chicken-and-egg proposition, I guess.)

At this writing, days after the production’s New York opening, not all outlets had run reviews.  (There are quite a few London notices on line, of course, such as the London Times and the Guardian, not to mention the IHT review that ran in the New York Times, but I didn’t comb through them.)  A “high-octane” production “brilliantly directed by Phyllida Lloyd” with “a terrific cast,”  Elisabeth Vincentelli of the New York Post calls the Donmar staging at St Ann’s.  It’s “gripping all the way through, from brutal beginning to bloody end,” the Postwoman declares, but “more than trendy shtick” which all “builds to a coherent theme.”   Also dubbing Lloyd’s JC “gripping,” the Times’s Brantley affirms, “A woman’s touch has not softened the hard and mighty ‘Julius Caesar.’”  The play maintains its “muscular strength and ferocity,” the Times reviewer writes, remarking, “The women playing men here seem poised to challenge the entire audience to put up its dukes—and perhaps to pull out contraband switchblades.”  Lloyd’s “crackling troupe,” Brantley says, delivers the Bard’s poetry “with a fiery fluency” under her “ingenious” staging.  In AM New York, Matt Windman reports, “The acting is extraordinary” and the production “is filled with inventive touches.”  Scott Brown calls Donmar’s JC “demonically fun, punk-pugnacious, occasionally unhinged” in his New York magazine review, and affirms that Lloyd’s “ferocious cast quietly underlines [their] point with joyously unquiet performances.”  “Nervous shivers of race and gender domination run just beneath the show’s skin,” says Brown, but the production’s “gender-flip isn’t polemical; it’s clarifying.”  Concluding that “here’s a Caesar that doesn’t even need balls; it’s got gall,” the New York reviewer asserts that Lloyd uses her conception “to thrilling effect here, teasing out the play’s deeper misanthropy, its anti-revolutionary despair and wounded cynicism.”  In Time Out New York, David Cote describes Lloyd’s staging of Julius Caesar as “blisteringly tense and crystalline” and the company as a “fierce ensemble.”  The man from TONY concludes, “Director and company may take great liberties with their frame, but this may be the most thrilling, lucid and, yes, authentic Julius Caesar for years to come.” 

In the cybersphere, Zachary Stewart writes on TheaterMania that this JC has been “brilliantly reimagined” by Lloyd into “an action-packed, sharp rendition” that “emphasizes the force of personality over the public imagination.”  Stewart’s conclusion is, “It is impossible to walk away from this production without new insights into the original text, which feels as relevant, prescient, and alive as ever.”  On CurtainUp, Deirdre Donovan writes that Lloyd’s transformation of Julius Caesar “ingeniously adds a new twist to the testosterone-laden work.”  It’s “a must-see for Bardolators,” says Donovan, bringing “new meaning to that theatrical phenomenon called ‘double-time’” that “pushes the theatrical envelope, and then some.”  She concludes, “You will be pulled into the action” of “a first-rate director's vision of a Shakespeare play” performed by “a solid ensemble.”  On Huffington Post, which once again ran two notices, David Finkle asserts that Donmar’s prison-set JC  is “all in good, grim fun and works well” and that Lloyd “guarantees that the cast does well.”  But Finkle spotlights “one major, and I mean truly major, drawback”: the Caesar Barber plays and Lloyd directed is “the worse [sic] kind of bully” about whom audiences are likely to say, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”  This undermines the idea that the dictator’s supporters might indeed be noble (or even entirely rational), weakening the play’s premise.  In Huffington’s other review, Michael Giltz calls Donmar’s Julius Caesar “an exciting new production” that’s simply “the best Julius Caesar I've ever seen” and “certainly one of the top shows of the year.”  Praising the production unsparingly, Giltz goes on to affirm that “the direction is focused and inventive while the performances are clear as a bell, moving and believable at every moment.” 

It was just too much effort to review all the London reviews (and only minimally relevant since I’m not discussing that show), but I have mentioned that the Telegraph gave the show not one, not two, but three bad notices.  Wolf’s IHT review was unfalteringly positive, but as I was surfing the pertinent websites for tidbits of information on the production, I came across a couple of blogs that begged to differ, if you will.  On R3OK, the blogger who calls himself (I’m assuming) HtoHe said bluntly that “whether or not the idea of an all-female Julius Caesar is valid, Phyllida Lloyd’s execution of it was, imo [in my opinion] of course, an unholy mess.”  (The blogger joked that he figured Lloyd had made “a bet that she could put on an all female Julius Caesar and include smoking, swearing and nudity and get half the hacks of the British press to declare it a triumph.”)  Of the basic concept for the Donmar production, HtoHe thought it was “all too embarrassing if, as it seemed to me, the director takes full advantage of the blurring of boundaries to indulge herself—or, being less charitable, to throw all sorts of inconsequential guff into the mix.”  In the end, the blogger summed up: “From the very start, . . . the classic play was used as padding for a prison story that had next to no substance.” 

The blogger Tilly Lunken allowed on her site, Onomatopoeia, that Lloyd places JC in “what appears to be an entirely appropriate context,” but found that the interpretation “does not satisfy because fundamentally it does not address what it arguably should be aiming to—the main drive of the production—the women.”  Lunken, a writer who works mostly in theater, deplored the lack of female characters (there are only two, aside from the prison officers) and asked, “But where were the women?”  Lunken determined that “it appears the entire construct of the women’s prison is just that.  A directorial decision to justify the casting,” or, as the sometime dramaturg put it: “a gimmick.”  Of the prison environment, the blogger said, “It doesn’t hold a mirror to the action, it doesn’t complement the action—it is reduced almost to a container for the action and little more.”  “The key principle of bringing a classical work into a contemporary context,” Lunken, recently accepted onto the Royal Court Young Writer's program, instructed, “is to use the new and working with the existing text create dynamic relationship between the two elements.”  It’s up to theatermakers, the blogger insisted, to “think hard about the implications of a particular setting and casting decision, to work with the politics of this and use them in the work.”  That’s what was missing in the Donmar’s Julius Caesar, as both Lunken and I seem to have felt.