Category: theatre

“Those thousands of people who are calling our corporate sponsors to complain about this – none of them have seen the show. They’re not interested in seeing the show. They haven’t read Julius Caesar. They are being manipulated by Fox & Friends and other news sources, which are deliberately, for their own gain, trying to rile people up and turn them against an imagined enemy, which we are not.”

Michael Billington makes a brief (and not entirely convincing) nod toward Richard III before suggesting a character from All’s Well That Ends Well whom he finds to bear a more-than-passing resemblance to the 45th President. (The commenters have plenty of suggestions of their own, of course.)

“What makes the ginned-up outrage over the play stupider is that Julius Caesar is hardly an endorsement of political violence. By its conclusion, it is a horror show in which political violence is the Big Bad. The play takes place during the twilight of the Roman Republic, as a representative government is being pulled apart by the twin stars of aristocratic ambition and public gullibility. Shakespeare depicts Caesar’s murder as a great crime that unleashes the very forces the conspirators, led by the manipulative Caius Cassius and the tortured, reluctant Marcus Brutus, were trying to prevent.”

“What nobody seems to question is that Mr. Albee and his estate have an absolute right to control the casting of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” for as long as the play is controlled by copyright. I have my doubts, however, about exactly how absolute that right is. While I’m not a lawyer, I suspect that a friendly judge might well look upon the requirement that Nick be played by a white man (Mr. Albee was identically militant about denying permission to change the sexes of the characters in “Virginia Woolf”) as a racially restrictive covenant contrary to law. On the other hand, the 35-seat Shoebox Theatre would have to lawyer up to fight that battle, and I also doubt they’ve got the resources to do so. My guess, then, is that no theater company will be bringing any such action anytime soon.”

Delta and Bank of America pulled out of sponsorship of the Public Theatre over the Julius Caesar production. “Twitter erupted in scorn: Had none of these people read the play in eighth grade? Did the killing come as a surprise? Did they not realize that it’s supposed to be tragic, not celebratory? Didn’t they remember that in a different production, in 2012, the Romans murdered an Obama-like Caesar, and nobody flipped out? And where does an immense bank or a widely unbeloved airline get off expressing moral qualms about a play?”

“The way conservative outlets packaged this story was brilliant. They removed Shakespeare from the top of the story and immediately made the report a referendum on amoral coastal elites. In the same way you can disparage “New York values” to indicate that you dislike homosexuals, or disparage “New York intellectuals” to indicate the same for Jews, you can call Julius Caesar a “New York play,” and your disciples will know exactly what you mean: an artsy-fartsy subversion perpetrated by a bunch of degenerate pansies. Should anyone be mad at Delta or Bank of America? Yes, but mainly for stupidity.”

“Washington theater is a city of niches, and few brands are as indelible as Woolly Mammoth’s. A ‘Woolly play’ is new, big, wild. The acting is hyper-real. The design might blow up. The whole thing can soar or splat. Howard Shalwitz laid down those markers when he [co-]created Woolly in 1980 … For 37 years, Shalwitz – who announced his retirement Tuesday as of the end of the 2017-2018 season – has stuck to those guns.”

“The effect of watching Caesar-as-Trump is outrageous, comical, and—especially if you number among those for whom the election of this President has felt like an appalling and dangerous swerve into farce—cathartic in its use of satire.”

They rehearsed as a group twice a week, and stole a few minutes here and there to run lines wherever they could—in the yard, in the law library, on the cellblock. Lawrence Bartley describes a process that sounds a lot like method acting when he talks about preparing for the role of Charley Malloy, played by Rod Steiger in the original 1954 film. “I try to take on the persona of the character, try to act like he would,” Bartley says. “Unless it would be offensive.” (This is prison, after all.)