Orange Julius

Julius Caesar at the Delacorte Theater.

(L-R: Tina Benko, Gregg Henry, Teagle F. Bougere, and Elizabeth Marvel in Julius Caesar.)

            At Thursday night’s performance of the Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar, the thesis of which is essentially that murdering Donald Trump would be a massively bad idea, a Trump supporter, standing outside the theater, spent approximately three-quarters of its two-hour runtime shouting a repeating array of phrases which sounded as if they included “Support President Trump,” and, in an unknown context, “Washington, D.C.!”  At the end of the show, another Trumpist (or Trumpkin, or whatever you will), dressed in a visor and American flag sport coat (which should've been a dead giveaway) ran down the middle aisle and unfurled an enormous red-white-and-blue flag emblazoned with “Trump 2020: Keep America Great.”  (The temporal implications of this, incidentally, given that it assumes that America will be made great and must be kept that way in some sort of status quo-to-be, are fascinating).  The flag-bearer’s apparent rebelliousness was somewhat undercut by the fact that he by definition would have had to wait outside the Delacorte Theater for five hours the same morning in order to sit through the entire performance and then make his statement.  Clearly, self-defining as the “opposition” is a messy business.

            This is further emphasized by the opacity of the imperfect show itself, which runs through June 18^th.  It’s this production that’s got a number of right-wingers, for whom setting foot in a theater under any circumstances would probably be considered a minor act of treason, all riled up – Caesar, in this version, as played by Gregg Henry, is unapologetically Donald Trump, with a blonde bouffant, a heavily accented-wife, and a fondness for gold and ties that appear to be eight feet long.  Based on the hugely overcompensatory backlash from the Trump-allied or -adjacent media (including the hilarious National Review headline "New York's Overrated Cultural Institutions"), going to see this show feels something like an act of defiance, especially given that, with the American political divide in the state it's in, one conceivably risks more than the effort of obtaining a ticket by going to see it.

The process of transposing the sixteenth-century play about events from 44 BC to the present day, undertaken by Public Theater artistic director and director of this production Oskar Eustis, has resulted in some confusing inconsistencies – Marc Antony (Elizabeth Marvel) stirs up a popular rebellion against Brutus (Corey Stoll), who’s murdered Caesar, for example, and the resulting movement at first appears in the guise of street protestors, but later is represented by SWAT team thugs who mow down (different) protestors.  Eustis gets caught up in the same conundrum that conflicted Shakespeare himself – whether Caesar’s allies, avenging an obscene act of political violence, or Brutus’s, self-described freedom fighters, are really the good guys.  The answer, of course, is that neither group fits that description, which may be why this production so resembles last summer’s Troilus and Cressida, which was also morally uncertain, set in our time, and featured Stoll as a steely military strategist, but was, partially thanks to Stoll’s excellent Ulysses, infinitely more complicated and interesting than this Caesar.  Here, Stoll, usually gratifyingly ambiguous, is utterly conventional; though practiced and professional, he brings no new approach to the role – and the same can be said of most of the enormous ensemble, including Marvel’s female, rootin’-tootin’ version of Antony, who is never as much fun as she promises to be.

The one actor who lives up to expectations, perhaps unsurprisingly, is Henry as the Trumped-up Caesar.  His blustery, larger-than-life performance is far from an impression – for one, by necessity, his tyrant is infinitely more articulate than the real thing – but, mainly thanks to Leah J. Loukas’s wig designs (he’s a handsome guy), he looks the part, and ably highlights the parallels between the two men.  One particular scene, in which Caesar lounges in a bathtub and sweet-talks his wife, Calpurnia (Tina Benko, marvelous if underused), is the funniest thing I’ve seen at the Delacorte in a long time, especially given the incredible kicker that the tall, broad Henry, rising from the tub to greet Brutus and his cohort, reveals himself to be stark-naked, resulting in what is certainly the only sexually-tinged response to Trump imagery an audience of die-hard liberals is likely to be heard to give anytime soon.

             Henry’s presence on the stage is so enjoyable that upon his character’s death, at the end of Act Three (which, contrary to what knee-jerk think-pieces you might have read, is actually pretty mild compared to the aforementioned protestor massacre), the air goes out of the play like helium from a punctured balloon.  That, unfortunately, means that there are still two and a half acts left to go, and what started out as a pitch-black satire gradually mutates into a dour march through the requisite history-play battles, reconciliations, and suicides.  Eustis, clearly, didn’t really want to stage Caesar, per se; he just wanted to make a point about our political situation, and it’s well-taken, if only to the degree that anyone who watches this production will realize that removing Trump from the stage through uninformed acts of brutality, compared to allowing him to collapse from the world stage in glorious slo-mo, would be much less fun.