The Philadelphia Theatre Company\u2019s latest production, \u201cCaesar,\u201d as adapted by Tyler Dobrowsky, Co-Artistic Director of PTC, contains sections of the Shakespeare original while it embraces \u2013 as Dobrowsky writes in the play\u2019s program notes \u2013 \u201ccontemporary tools \u2013 video, projection, screens \u2013 not to modernize the play superficially, but to reflect how power, persuasion, and image-making operate both in the play and in our current political climate.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Dobrowsky\u2019s version focuses on four Roman figures \u2013 Brutus, Cassius, Marc Antony and Caesar, whose political choices \u201cpropel Rome toward civil war.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a lot of blood in this play, especially when Caesar \u2014 dictator or would-be dictator, depending on your point of view \u2014 is assassinated.\u00a0As anyone who has ever read Robert Graves\u2019s 1934 historical novel I Claudius knows, the Roman Empire was rife with small revolutions and assassination plots, with mother plotting against son, son against father. Few could be trusted in what seemed like an eternal cavalcade of terror. Self-proclaimed tyrant haters killed tyrants, only to become tyrants themselves.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Dobrowsky notes that \u201cthis production is not as interested in one-to-one political allegory.\u201d He cites Oskar Eustis\u2019s \u201ctwo landmark interpretations, one which posited Caesar as a JFK-like figure, the other as a MAGA-hat wearing Trump stand-in.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
There are no direct references to Donald Trump in the play aside from a quick video clip from January 6, a visual that is rendered powerless because of the overlay of other videos depicting revolutions, revolts, protests and world wars. The video juxtapositions depict all kinds of uprisings, from the right and the left. Tyrants transcend party affiliation despite the fact that at any given time at least half the population is going to view a supposed tyrant as a savior.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Dobrowsky deserves credit for staying away from the MAGA-equals-boogeyman equation, which would be so easy to do in the left-leaning Philly theater world. The MAGA-as-tyrant approach would have dumbed down the play to propaganda. The existential approach the play takes is simple yet intricate: power corrupts \u2014 all power, whether it\u2019s Biden on the edge of dementia having his staff auto-pen executive orders, Trump on a bad day, or Abraham Lincoln when he significantly expanded presidential war powers, suspended habeas corpus and authorized military arrests without Congress\u2019s initial approval.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In an interview with a student blogger named Brianna Arie in \u201cBroadway Forum,\u201d Dobrowsky stated the play was not trying to say, \u201cCaesar is this current president or former president\u2026.I think it\u2019s trying to get you to think about some of the deeper ideas that are inside the play\u2026. the play could be about how these evil senators killed the good Caesar. Or it could be about how these really righteous, good senators killed the evil, autocratic, wannabe dictator Caesar. You don\u2019t have to do that much to shift [Caesar] like that. So, that\u2019s what I kind of love about it. It\u2019s a play that you can do in so many different ways.\u201d<\/p>\n
Caesar, played by Jude Sandy, is a black man \u2014 this alone squashes superficial Donald Trump comparisons \u2014 with extensive Broadway\/Lincoln Center experience. The Caesar he plays is not a scary, out-of-control Caesar but presents as mostly good-natured, somewhat frivolous, and a little narcissistic (he\u2019d rate a 10 on the looksmaxxing scale).<\/p>\n
Brutus, played by\u00a0Matteo Scammell \u2014 a Barrymore Award winner who has done work with the Ardan Theatre Company and Wilma Hothouse \u2014 is a natural Alpha warrior type, emotionally cold but an expert at flattery as he plots with his Beta companion, Cassius (played by J. Hernandez, who\u2019s worked with Theatre Exile and Quintessence ), an excessive talker who wears his emotions on his sleeve and who follows Brutus around like a stray pup.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Cassius and Brutus share a love beyond ordinary friendship that comes close to suggesting aspects of classical Greco-Roman homosexuality, although that\u2019s left to our imagination. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, why Caesar is so hated and why he has to be assassinated is never fully explained other than the fact that his assassins and others fear he may want to crown himself king. Ironically, Caesar has already refused the crown but the assassins don\u2019t trust his refusal. Perhaps he\u2019s just the guy in power who has to be gotten rid of because the human thirst for revolution is endless. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Director Morgan Green writes in her \u201cDirector\u2019s Notes,\u201d that the play\u2019s \u201cemotional logic feels modern.\u201d She adds: \u201cWe often found ourselves laughing and crying in rehearsal, relating deeply to the characters\u2019 experiences of love, hope and pain\u2026. Though this play contains some of Shakespeare\u2019s most famous lines, it ends in a battlefield depicted here through Jungwoong Kim\u2019s ethereal physical vocabulary\u2026.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
This choreography of war (the play has no intermission) happens in the latter section where the male characters wage battle, fall down, roll around, and then come together in a (heavy breathing) orgiastic human mountain of arms entwined with arms, faces meshed with faces, and legs wrapped around the whole ensemble as the men \u201cpulsate\u201d on stage for quite some time.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
This part really goes on far too long and could have been shortened to increase its effectiveness.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The actual Caesar assassination is rendered in a realistic way:\u00a0Jude Sandy really knows how to depict a dying man who has just been stabbed several times, especially when we hear the gurgling sounds he makes from his throat. This death pang is all too real. The assassins then take a blood oath after they dip their hands into a small fountain filled with Caesar\u2019s blood.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And this is where things get messy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Marc Antony (Jaime Maseda, who\u2019s performed with Pig Iron, the Wilma and Off-Broadway), a friend of Caesar\u2019s, walks in one the killing scene and then has to make his peace with the assassins although he\u2019s fast to betray them with a plot of his own. His performance is stellar. He\u2019s able to show the tension of placating power while secretly orchestrating his own revolution.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He bides his time, then strikes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The result is another cavalcade of terror: Get rid of one dictator and another takes his place. Civil war follows the assassination as Marc Antony takes the no. 1 power spot, but the clock is ticking.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The acting in Caesar is impeccable, but the war choreography where soldiers \u201cdance\u201d and fall down in battle, rolling this way and that in a kind of ballet of death, calls for a dramaturge. \u00a0<\/p>\n
As Jungwoong Kim, the play\u2019s choreographer notes:\u00a0 \u201cCharacters dissolve into faceless bodies moving through space\u2026. The result is operatic and relentless \u2013 figures eternally grasping, clawing and striving until the bitter end.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Postscript: The day after I saw the play I ran into actor William Rahill in my local supermarket.\u00a0Rahill started talking about \u201cCaesar\u201d and the fact that a good female friend of his was responsible for cleaning up the blood on stage after each performance. He told me, \u201cYou can imagine the work involved in that!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m looking for some food to bring her when I go to the theater,\u201d he added.\u00a0<\/p>\n
With all that blood, you need food.<\/p>\n
Thom Nickels is Broad + Liberty\u2019s Editor at Large for Arts and Culture and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including \u201cLiterary Philadelphia\u201d and \u201dFrom Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.\u201d His latest work, \u201cIleana of Romania: Princess, Exile and Mother Superior,\u201d will be published in May 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Philadelphia Theatre Company\u2019s latest production, \u201cCaesar,\u201d as adapted by Tyler Dobrowsky, Co-Artistic Director of PTC, contains sections…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":117051,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[12287,46389,69,71,70,34341,1483],"class_list":{"0":"post-117050","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia","8":"tag-arts-culture","9":"tag-julius-caesar","10":"tag-philadelphia","11":"tag-philadelphia-headlines","12":"tag-philadelphia-news","13":"tag-shakespeare","14":"tag-theater"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117050\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}