Theater review by Helen Shaw
For something that’s been knocking around for so long, theater sure is fragile. You take a piece that’s wonderful in space A, you remount it in space B, and suddenly the dynamics go to hell. Everything is interdependent and hypersensitive. In the case of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, the recreation of Shana Cooper’s much-praised 2017 staging at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival seems to have lost something crucial—its volume control—in its current transfer to Theater for a New Audience.
Cooper’s version of Caesar leans hard into a “war is bad” take: Arguments in the Senate are tough-fella chest thumping, and many scenes are loudly underscored, with (accidentally hilarious) dance fighting that borrows from the New Zealand haka. During the civil war in the second half, we see images taken from modern conflicts: a rope-line of prisoners who might be marching off to Abu Ghraib; soldiers’ fatigues smeared in black commando paint.
The production fries its circuits in just its opening moments, when Caesar-mad commoners are hollering their heads off in the streets of Rome (represented by designer Sibyl Wickersheimer as a demolition site with cracked walls and gravel buckets). In the incomprehensible first exchange, a patrician puts a jean-shorted plebeian in a headlock. Under Cooper’s direction, actors don’t just telegraph their subtext; they scream it, elaborately mime it, then wrestle it to the ground. Yet, perversely, this explicitness makes the play less clear. Rocco Sisto’s Caesar is oily, hesitant and hollow, which turns those who love him, like Mark Antony (Jordan Barbour), into fools. And any Brutus (Brandon J. Dirden) who could be flattered by such a callow Cassius (Matthew Amendt) is a peacocking bro-man, not a citizen riven by conscience.
So how does this shout-fest square with the success of the 2017 version? Many of the actors have stayed on; the design appears similar, if scaled up for the three-tier TFANA space. That scaling up might be the problem. In his quieter moments, Barbour’s Antony has a genuinely wondering timbre, and there are hints that the fighting-at-a-tailgate-party quality of the group scenes might have been exciting if everyone had taken it down a few notches. As Caesar could have told them, nothing puts you in the way of failure like success. Praised for its virility, the production has amplified what it thinks the people want to hear. But it’s difficult to lend them your ears when those ears are so busy ringing.
Theater for A New Audience (Off Broadway). By William Shakespeare. Directed by Shana Cooper. With ensemble cast. Running time: 2hrs. One intermission.
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