I’m honored and moved to be directing my first mainstage play here, and not only that, but to partner with Michael—who has been my mentor for three years—on two productions that are linked in terms of approach, world and character. In our minds, it’s like we’re doing parts one and two.
Julius Caesar is a play about an enormous failure—a geopolitical, world historical failure. Here is a group of men who are hoping to engage in an act that saves their Republic, and instead they wind up paving the way for the most powerful emperor the world has ever known.
It’s surprising to me that Julius Caesar is often the first Shakespeare play students read in high school. In a way that makes sense, because the language in the play is so clear and because there really isn’t anything bawdy in it. Yet at its core, Julius Caesar is a subversive and cynical beast of a play. It’s almost as if we’re saying to our ninth-graders, “Idealism is pointless, the world is full of sharks, the body politic is really fickle, and brutality is inherent to the human condition. See you tomorrow!”
One of the play’s great strengths, and central challenges of getting it right, is its highly structured language. It’s important to deal with the language in a way that captures its force but that doesn’t flatten character or make the play feel structured, rational or controlled—because the play is anything but. It’s out of control. It happens too fast. It’s a thriller in that sense.
Both Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra will be done in period, complete with togas and Roman standards. It did take me some time to get used to the idea of togas, but I’m grateful for the HBO series Rome and recent movies like Gladiator, because they’ve helped to banish from our minds images of the 1960s Hollywood Rome of Spartacus and Elizabeth Taylor, and have helped us recognize how sexy Rome was. Romans wore luxurious fabrics simply; there is nothing constricted or buttoned-up about their clothing, and there’s danger and sexiness in the notion that these people don’t have much to hide behind.
Doing the plays in period also allows us to explore, with grand costume gestures, the ceremony and ritual of ancient Rome. No one seems to do these plays in period anymore—the standard has become half-modern, half-Roman productions with suits and Romanesque sashes—so Michael and I take some pride in how oddly bold and novel it feels to set the plays in Rome. Plus, the rhetoric of Julius Caesar is so overtly Roman that I think if we were to set it anywhere else you’d be fighting a lot of what the play is trying to do.
It’s especially exciting to be directing this “old” Roman play in Washington, where we know a thing or two about an executive who claims new powers his office has never had before, politicians who move and manipulate people through rhetoric, and grand plans gone terribly wrong. Because D.C. audiences are so tuned in and so remarkably adept at connecting what’s going on onstage to current affairs, it’s a special thrill to be doing the play here.