Caesar In The Modern Age

(Photo credit to Mark Garvin)

I know I’ve probably said this a million times, but I am a huge Shakespeare nerd.  I’ve been studying his work since I was six years old.  I’ve read a good chunk of his work (including some of the Histories, and those are super hard).  I have my favorite quote from The Tempest (my favorite Shakespeare play) tattooed on me.  Throughout the past thirty years, Shakespeare has been an inspiration to me, and I don’t know where I’d be, especially in the theatre world, without that love.  Shakespeare is such an important figure…in the theatre world, in the literary world, and to anyone who has ever used one of his phrases without realizing he came up with it.

But just because I feel this way about the Bard doesn’t mean everyone does.  I am well aware of the fact that Shakespeare can be very hard to swallow in our modern age.  Elizabethan English is different enough from modern English that you may not always understand what is being said.  Lots of the ideas and plot devices are dated (who even knows what “Get thee to a nunnery!” means?).  However, that doesn’t mean you can’t bring Shakespeare into the present…and Philadelphia Theatre Company’s Caesar does just that.

There’s this trend these days to condense Shakespeare plays, which I think is a pretty damn good idea.  It makes these shows a lot more palatable.  A lot of these plays would traditionally be extremely long.  It’s definitely a lot to sit through.   Tyler Dobrowsky did an absolutely stunning job of cutting Julius Caesar down to an hour and a half.  I didn’t feel like I was missing anything.  This was a promising start to what I already knew was going to be a great show.  For as hard as the delivery can be, I felt very receptive to this.  And truly, everything was woven together masterfully.  We definitely got the good stuff.

My mom said something extremely interesting about watching Shakespeare.  She said, “When you don’t focus on the words and you let it flow over you, it becomes intuitive and you understand it.”  Part of what made this even more true about Caesar was the combination of classic and current.  Although the actors were using the language, there was video used.  All the characters had cell phones, and dressed in suits and ties.  And yet, they were also in Roman bathhouses and using daggers.  I think this made it even easier for it to become intuitive.

Another part of this is how the actors truly embodied both their old language and their modern props and ideals.  With a cast of only four, it was truly amazing to see these people making this show theirs.  I loved each and every one of them, and the part/s that they played.  They really brought it to life for me.  When you cut down a show this much, there’s a lot of running around and doing things you wouldn’t always do in any show, like having an actor play multiple parts.  But Caesar even did this, and they included really brilliant things.  Jude Sandy’s accent changed from his portrayal of Caesar (his native accent) to Octavius.  All of these actors brought it to life.

Caesar is a show that could be used for pretty much any political figure, and the way they staged the show really did it.  The characters were all pretty unlikeable, honestly…but I’m not sure they were supposed to be likable.  Seeing this show through a modern lens really changed things for me.  I understood things about this play that I’ve never understood before.  It goes back to my mom’s point about how it can actually be very intuitive.

Even if you think you don’t know anything about Julius Caesar, you probably do.  There are famous lines like, “Beware the Ides of March” and “Et tu, Brutus?”  Dobrowsky did a really great job capitalizing on these familiar phrases, along with some of the other more known lines, and if there’s any way to cut down Shakespeare, I think that’s the way to do it.  The actors really carried through with the writing in this revised script.  The combination of all of it made for a truly beautiful show.

The war choreography, designed by Jungwoong Kim, also deserves some attention.  Something as ugly as war shouldn’t look so beautiful, but Kim made it so.  He is definitely a master of movement.  Watching these moments at the end of Caesar tied everything together so stunningly.  Julius Caesar is an ugly story and an ugly play.  It’s the very nature of the whole thing.  But watching this battle choreographed by Kim juxtaposed this in the best way possible.  It was a great way to deliver us to the end of Caesar.

This production is a beautiful testament to Shakespeare.  It was true to his writing, as Dobrowsky was clearly careful with his words.  It brought us a mix of Shakespeare’s vision and director Morgan Green’s vision.  I would recommend it to lovers of the Bard, people who know nothing about Shakespeare and his work, and everyone in between.  Caesar definitely delivered, which is definitely no easy job.