Word: caesars
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...mangle a script in the interests of originally; their director's Romeo and Juliet was set mysteriously and superfluously in modern-day Belfast, and Bill Coe's Memlet offered the truly creative line-reading "To be, or not?... To be!" But now the fever seems to have broken. Caesar, which will run repertory with Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, demonstrates the virtues of an almost lost art: the straight reading. Unaffected period costumes, a simple Roman-looking set, and very alert casting give the audience a secure sense of a play with dynamism and direction...
...director tackling Caesar must contend with the plot's most frequently criticized peculiarity--the apparent central character disappears two acts before final curtain, leaving the focus of the play where it has been hovering all along, on Brutus. Director Gavin Cameron-Webb clearly follows this school and gives it an extra push; Joe Gargiulo as Caesar is almost a caricature, stiff and monarchical with a booming voice. He flat-out yells a good portion of his lines, but the exaggeration seems called for: it fits the mood...
OTHER DETAILS are handled in equally open-eyed fashion. Carter Reardon as Cassius, the driving force behind the conspiracy to kill Caesar, looks properly "lean and hungry." More than in many productions of Shakespeare, thought is given to differentiating the subordinate female characters; Brutus's wife Portia (Crystal Miller) is tiny, delicate-looking, with a voice of steel, while the more ineffectual Calpurnia (Melinda McCrary) has a habit of turning back and forth to the various characters on stage, as if entreating them to listen to her. And when Caesar's ghost walks across the stage to warn Brutus...
...real beneficiary of this direct approach, of course, is Henry Woronicz as Mark Antony, whose orations over the dead Caesar--not just the famous "Friends, Romans, Countrymen," but the Machiavellian masterpieces that follow--provide a classic example of words that don't need stagecraft to make them work. True, the otherwise subtle lighting design turns a bit blatant for the great funeral speech, dropping to a single spotlight as soon as Antony begins to speak, spectators' yells coming out of the near-pitch dark. Even that tactic, though, carries a certain ingenuous charm; why shouldn't Woronicz and director Cameron...
...sticking exactly to original milieus, will take over the company's directorship after the current season ends; whatever his plans, though, he is fortunate to be meeting up with a group whose feet, at long last, seem to have regained contact with the theatrical ground. The Tragedy of Julius Caesar appears, at the very least, to know where it is. And, as everyone knows, it's a lot easier from there to figure out where you're going...