Summary 
Exhilarating and creative modernization of Julius Caesar to today's Washington D.C. war rooms and board rooms. Antony is played by a woman in a strapless evening gown slit to the hip, and Caesar is a Las Vegas icon in a white tuxedo. Killed in a hail of gunfire, Caesar returns to the stage to haunt Brutus throughout the remainder of the production. An onstage Chorus provides a startling array of evocative sound effects. Clever, incisive, thrilling theatre.
Design
Directed by Dexter Bullard. Set and lights by Robert G. Smith. Costumes by Sraa Davidson. Sound by David Zerlin.
Cast
Henry Bolzon (Cicero/Chorus), Holly Cardone (Lucius/Chorus), Laura T. Fisher (Portia), Darrel Ford (Decius/Pindarus), Thomas Greene (Trebonius/Titinius), Millicent Hurley (Calphurnia), Wayne Kneeland (Metellus/ Lucilius), Doug McDade (Cinna/Messala), Marc A. Nelson (Casca/Octavius), Rick Peeples (Julius Caesar), Kirsten Sahs (Antony), Don Tieri (Cassius), Benjamin Werling (Brutus).
Analysis
The Next Theatre Company's modernized Julius Caesar exudes a Washingtonian political atmosphere, with the characters formally attired in tuxedoes and evening gowns for Caesar's celebratory testimonial dinner. For nearly the first half of the play the conspiratorial whisperings and behind-the-scenes intrigues are cleverly revealed as spot-lit asides to the festive, open-to-the-public celebration. The set consists of two long banquet tables facing the audience from either side of a center-stage microphone stand; each white-clothed table includes a microphone, as well as a water pitcher and glasses. Behind the microphone stand a ramp leads to a deep-set dais, and the set is bordered by thirteen hanging metal screens that provide a broken, tarnished backdrop and are shaken for thunderous sound effects or individually consulted as war-room maps. Between each of the screens hangs a long pipe, several of which are struck to simulate chiming music and tolling bells. The second half of the production, after the governmental upheaval and onslaught of civil war, is staged with essentially the same set, although the two tables are turned to oppose each other, and from opposite sides of the stage, represent the two factions' war rooms. The tables are cluttered with radio headsets, charts and maps and plans, binoculars, execution lists, and bullhorns for pre-battle parley.
Onstage almost constantly is a twelve-person Chorus, dressed in blue-hooded choral robes. The Chorus provides myriad sound effects by singing, chanting, humming, and beating rhythms on their bodies; during the portentous rainstorm, they create thunder with the screens, make hissing noises for the wind, and simulate the downpour by patting themselves rhythmically. When they remove their robes they become the plebeian masses themselves, dressed in modern middle-class street clothes. During the long center-stage speeches by Caesar, Brutus, and Antony, the rabble alternately hoots and hollers and cheers, or boos and hisses and jeers, depending on how they have been manipulated. They end the first half of the production with a particularly chilling moment, after Antony's speech has turned them against Brutus and Cassius: waving their arms and pumping their fists in the air, their angry chant of "we will be satisfied!" rises to a deafening crescendo amid furious flashes of light, and then ceases sharply, resonating in total, abrupt darkness. The Chorus returns to the stage for the second half in a funeral procession, each member holding a candle in a long staff and chanting in Latin, walking slowly through the audience from either side. The solemnity of their mourning contrasts with their murderous reaction to Cinna the poet, who is viciously badgered and interrogated. Their staffs suddenly become weapons as the Chorus imprisons Cinna and then beats him to death, pummeling the stage with vehemence.
Caesar is flamboyantly played by Rick Peeples as more of a Las Vegas or Hollywood icon than a conquering hero. He has long, slicked-back hair and a goatee, a flashy smile he shows often, and a white tuxedo that opposes the black of the other characters' formalwear. He enters through the audience to tumultuous applause, his arms upraised in pompous acceptance, pausing once onstage to point and wink at someone in the crowd. The Chorus chants his name repeatedly while stomping their feet in thunderous rhythm. On his way center-stage, Caesar stops to shake hands, whisper a few words, and give a quick hug or kiss to each of his "supporters" at the tables, and once at the microphone he silences the boisterous crowd with an amusingly quick wave of his arms. Portrayed as superficial and inflated - and revealed to be childless, epileptic, deaf in one ear, overly superstitious, and physically infirm - Caesar is killed by conspirators who carry handguns in shoulder holsters, rather than daggers or swords. Executed in a hail of thirty-three bullets, the shocked Caesar staggers up the ramp and dies in a sprawl on the dais. After a long moment, Caesar rises slowly, surreally, and walks back down the ramp, the assassins frozen with their weapons at arms-length. His eyes on Brutus, Caesar intones eerily into the echoing microphone, "Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar!" before returning to his position on the dais.
Caesar remains onstage for the second half of the play, seated on a spot-lit throne at the top of the dais, overseeing the rest of the events with Calphurnia - and after her death, Portia - kneeling at his side. His actual physical presence underscores the pervasiveness of his spiritual influence within the masses and especially within Brutus, whom Caesar tells he is his "evil spirit." Other than the ghost scene, Caesar's only lines are commands to the Chorus - "left, right, march" or "shoulder, arms" - which obediently pounds the stage like marching troops and acts as military firing squads. Upon each execution or suicide - Portia, Cassius, Titinius, and Brutus - the specter of Caesar raises a pistol, calmly instructs the firing squad ("ready, aim, fire") and in sudden blackness, fires his own weapon. In the darkened silence afterward, the shell casing from Caesar's bullet rolls slowly to the bottom of the ramp with metallic, amplified clarity.
Benjamin Werling portrays Brutus as a contrast to the brash and shallow, white-tuxedoed Caesar. Werling's Brutus, dressed in black, is mature and soft-spoken, somber and introspective, and after the assassination he is cold and despondent. As all the characters in this production are onstage for nearly the entire play, posed suspended in mid-action when not central, even unwritten scenes are visually presented, such as Caesar's epileptic fit and Brutus' confession to Portia. In the latter scene Brutus bares his tortured soul in semidarkness, embracing Portia tenderly, communicating silently, while in the foreground - standing upon the tables - Cassius and the other conspirators plan the coup d'état. Cassius' proclivity to violence is clearly evident from the early moments: played as an emotionally fiery, grinning Machiavellian, after the assassination he brandishes his pistol in a blood-soaked hand with jittery menace. While Brutus' dread of even "necessary" violence is obvious, his apparent contrast to the deposed Caesar is strikingly diminished later, when he silences the unruly and outraged mob with the exact same wave of arms as Caesar employed.
Dynamically staged with intense visual and aural emphasis, director Dexter Bullard's production features several remarkable moments: Portia's distressed panic is punctuated with the letter of warning from Artemidorus, sung in gospel-style by a member of the Chorus; the exhilarated assassins, sleeves rolled high, exult graphically by smearing themselves to the elbows in Caesar's "blood"; and in a particularly quirky innovation, Mark Antony is portrayed by Kirsten Sahs, a long-haired blonde woman dressed in a strapless black evening gown that is slit to the hip. Because of this gender switch, Sahs lends considerable tension to Antony's deeply felt love for and devotion to Caesar, and especially in "her" motivations to avenge him. Finally, the production's closing image is memorable: following Antony's homage to Brutus ("this was a man") and after all the other characters have left the stage, Caesar rises from his throne, his presence still ever-significant. Spot lit, he slowly descends the ramp, his black-gloved right hand raised and aflame, in a startlingly literal echo of Casca's sighting of a slave in the rainstorm with a hand burning "like twenty torches joined," but un-scorched. Once center-stage, Caesar stares out over the entire audience, and, with a sudden exhalation, blows out the fire on his hand, dramatically rendering the theatre pitch-black, thus ending the spate of bloodshed, and the production itself.
Note: A version of this article was edited and published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Vol.11, No.3, Summer 1993.