Theater review: Julius Caesar

by Joan Arbery of Renegade Bus

DALLAS — “Beware the Ides of March.” I always have. Not that some dear friend of mine will suddenly go turncoat on me. But that March, like these sometimes sodden and brisk autumnal days, has the same spell of inbetweenness. Keenly-felt chill breezes mix with moments of bright sunshine, marking a liminal moment, a hinterland between shadows of winter and clearings of spring. It is an eerie and netherworldly time. With that month also comes the memory of Caesar’s death — a man felled for his ambition by his friends.

With Shakespeare Dallas’ production of Julius Caesar, which fittingly has scheduled its performance to coincide with the start of fall and its own melancholies, there is much spectacle and speechifying. Romans, after all, liked to orate; and they also loved their bread and circuses. What we find in Raphael Parry’s direction of the show is much of both, sometimes clumsily married together, but often creatively and cogently done.

Let me begin with those things that, like March’s budding tumescence, can sometimes feel awkward about the production. Cassius, who helps undo Caesar, is played by Aaron Roberts. While Roberts did a marvelous job of mucking it up as Dr. Caius in The Merry Wives of Windsor, here he feels forced in the role — somewhat weak as an enemy. He’s spluttering in his reactions, lacking the measure that Brutus (Anthony L. Ramirez), however bituminous, manages to strike. The apparent dichotomy between a short Brutus and a tall Cassius is also disrupting.

Julius Caesar (Adrian Spencer Churchill) has no gravitas. Rather, he seems a bombastic, pompous charlatan. You don’t mourn his loss. Mark Antony (Austin Tindle) does well with some sarcastic deliverance of lines, such as, “Yet Brutus says [Caesar] was ambitious, and Brutus is an honorable man.” But Tindle also seems a little less than imperial, if only by nature of his stature.

Perhaps this disjuncture stems from the fact that we think of Romans as, if not yet gods, still more than mortals. Surely Caesar was an athletic, able-bodied man, strong but also lithe? This fitness would be hard to tell based on the long robes that cover Churchill’s body. While Laurie Land’s costume-design is interesting, with inflections of classical antiquity for the women, and Brutus and Cassius dressed in pseudo-Mao suits, their cohorts looking something like mobsters, there is some confusion here about which superpower commentary is going on. But perhaps that is the point—that all empires see their rulers fall.

Despite some infelicitous casting and costuming, there are some quite good scenes and characters in Julius Caesar. I found the intermittent singing of Trebonius (Mike Schraeder) and Lucius (Calvin Roberts) quite lyrical and haunting, imbuing the production with an element of the otherworldly. Anthony L. Ramirez’ Brutus’, while seemingly thuggish at times, does take on a more introspective and tortured role as the play unwinds. His fall we feel. There are some tender moments between Brutus and his wife, Portia (Hilary Couch), who is brave and entreating. (However, Brutus’ indifference to her death in the production seems a little strange.) I was glad to see Matt Fowler (Cinna) on stage, who, though only granted a bit part, commands his character with more grace and agility than some leads do.

Bruce Richardson’s sound design, with huge crashes of thunder reverberating across the stage, in tandem with Lois Catanzaro’s lighting design, where lightning seems to sporadically flicker, add to the set’s nefarious allure. Lloyd Caldwell’s fight design, where umpteen of Brutus’ lackeys get swashbuckled, is “bully.” And Robert Winn’s scenic design — a classical structure replete with columns, pedestals (with blood spurting down them during Caesar’s fall), pediments, and a god perched atop the roof — nicely houses the whole.

While SD’s mash of visual effects and staging is sometimes unwieldy, so is the play. Who is Julius Caesar really about? And who is the real superpower that’s deposed here? Caesar, the man, is the archetype of the ambitious man. Or is he an archetype of the misunderstood man? SD’s production made me revisit these questions as I listened to the language of the murderers: We are “sacrificers, but not butchers; purgers, not murderers.”

Perhaps in its very ambiguous (and ambitious) staging, SD’s Julius Caesar unveils these quandaries. The logic and justification of staging a coup must be an awkward reasoning process. As we see in the playing out of that logic, both victims and perpetrators fall. So, in the end, all “stagings” fail. Yet still we mourn what is toppled, feeling the presence of a lack.