Shakespeare in a Divided America

by James Shapiro

  This was the fourth time since the 1980s that Eustis would direct Julius Caesar, and his understanding of the play had evolved over the years. “When I first did this,” he said, “my stance was that Cassius was right, Brutus was wrong, and that the only thing they did wrong was that they didn’t go far enough.” He likened his earliest take on it to Bertolt Brecht’s late play The Days of the Commune, which argued “that the Paris Commune failed because they didn’t go far enough. They didn’t actually decide to hang on to power. They just tried to stay pure.” Thirty years later Eustis had come to a different understanding: “It’s not that I think Brutus is right. It’s not that I think Julius Caesar is right. What I’m watching is a group of people struggling with how” to “take political power,” and how, then, “does that political power reflect their values?” For Eustis, Antony is “somebody who can take power, but has no idea how to make that reflect” his values. With “Brutus and Cassius, you have the case of people who don’t know how to take power.” And with Caesar and Octavius, “you have people who are able to take power and who are able to use that to reflect their values, which is to have power. Power becomes an end in itself. And that of course is the destruction of democracy.”

  My work at the Public Theater has also involved helping out with the pair of large-scale Delacorte Shakespeare productions every summer. This has typically meant joining the company for the first week or two of rehearsals when the text is unpacked and analyzed, and before that helping directors prepare a working script. Eustis knew the play’s opening moves, its gambits, traps, and endgame. He also knew, as anyone who has tackled the play soon learns, that Julius Caesar is broken backed, the second half—mostly involving a quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, followed by a blur of confusing battle scenes culminating in their self-inflicted deaths and the triumph of Antony and Octavius—invariably a letdown, never quite matching the drama of the buildup to Caesar’s assassination. I didn’t direct, couldn’t act, and wasn’t a dramaturge, but I was invited into the rehearsal room because I could explain what Shakespeare’s words meant and speak about the play’s Elizabethan contexts. Eustis recognized the power and precision of Shakespeare’s words and his cast understood that a deeper knowledge of that language offered vital clues to their characters’ actions and motivations. My small role meant that I could watch what turned out to be a remarkable production take shape, then see it performed at the Delacorte as many times as I liked.

  One reason why Julius Caesar is rarely staged nowadays is that its large cast (so many of whom deliver major speeches) demands so many talented actors. In this respect it differs from Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and Richard III—Shakespeare plays that have long dominated the American theater—which could be staged with just a star or two. Eustis was charismatic and the Public Theater a showcase for top actors. He quickly assembled a strong cast, their faces familiar from television, film, and Broadway shows, including Corey Stoll as Brutus, John Douglas Thompson as Cassius, Nikki M. James as Portia, and Teagle Bougere as Casca. Eustis had initially toyed with the idea of having a woman play both Calpurnia and Octavius. In the end, he decided against that and cast Tina Benko as Calpurnia and Robert Gilbert as Octavius. In what turned out to be an inspired decision, he cast Elizabeth Marvel (who had just played the president of the United States on Homeland) as Antony.

  It would be a modern-dress rather than a “toga” production, set in contemporary America, with giant banners depicting George Washington and Abraham Lincoln framing the stage. A tall, blond Caesar, dressed in a business suit and wearing overlong blue or red ties, resembled Donald Trump, and an elegant and Slavic-accented Calpurnia his wife Melania. When Eustis told me early on about what he was envisioning, I asked whether he would reach out to Alec Baldwin, who had a long history at the Public Theater and whose wicked impersonation of Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live had infuriated Trump and captivated viewers—and he shook his head. I had misunderstood: this was not going to be satiric. He cast Gregg Henry as Caesar; familiar to moviegoers from his many roles as a tough guy, Henry was slimmer and younger than Trump, but his gait, intonation, and swagger perfectly captured those of the new president.

  Eustis drew on his own previous experience as well as decades of seeing versions of the play directed by others, though the longest shadow over his production was cast by one directed by Orson Welles in 1937 at Broadway’s Mercury Theatre. This landmark show had been America’s first major modern-dress Shakespeare. And, whether directors were aware of it or not, it would profoundly influence all subsequent American productions of the play. Arguably, no other interpretation of any Shakespeare play in America would exercise so powerful a gravitational pull on its successors.

  The 22-year-old Welles, fresh from his success with an innovative “Voodoo” Macbeth in Harlem the previous year, again broke sharply with tradition. His production cut two ways. It was, as Welles later said, “overtly anti-fascist.” The pro-Caesar camp dressed in military garb and gave fascist salutes, and Joseph Holland’s Caesar, with his jutting chin, even bore a passing resemblance to Mussolini. The subtitle that Welles added—The Death of a Dictator—made his political slant unambiguous. Yet Welles refused to celebrate the conspiracy or depict Brutus (whose role he kept for himself) as noble. Quite the contrary. He saw Brutus as an “impotent, ineffectual, fumbling liberal; the reformer who wants to do something about things but doesn’t know how and gets it in the neck in the end. He’s dead right all the time, and dead at the final curtain,” a “bourgeois intellectual, who, under a modern dictatorship, would be the first to be put up against a wall and shot.” Reviewers at the time struggled, without much success, to reconcile the production’s warnings about the dangers of fascism with its equal insistence on the limits and cluelessness of liberalism. Welles, who saw both sides, was drawn to the play precisely “because Shakespeare has feelings for and against everyone in it.”

  Welles’s production was also notable for its insights into emerging media and their capacity to manipulate the masses and undermine democracy. Newsreels at the time showed how carefully choreographed large-scale rallies in Germany and Italy were stirring up bigotry and nationalism. His production cost roughly $6,000, a pittance for a Broadway show—but Welles insisted on using the latest in playhouse technology, installing thirteen 500-watt “uplights” to create the so-called Nuremberg effect, reproducing for Broadway audiences some of the frightening impact of a Nazi rally.

  For two centuries, directors had cut a scene that comes shortly after Caesar’s murder which threatened to undermine the nobility of the conspirators; including it might suggest that they too had acted like a bloodthirsty mob. Welles restored this scene, and for many playgoers and reviewers it was the most searing one in his production. In it, a poet named Cinna wanders out in the evening and is accosted by fellow citizens who, stirred up by Antony, are angrily seeking out supporters of the conspiracy. He protests that he is Cinna the poet and not Cinna the conspirator, and tries to escape, but they surround then brutally murder him—their anti-elitism signaled in their desire to “Tear him for his bad verses” (3.3.31).

  While most of the mob in Welles’s version was dressed like working-class Americans, a few wore paramilitary garb, and the scene suggested that mob violence and fascistic tendencies were domestic issues, not merely foreign ones. As Welles told the New York Times, “It’s the same mob . . . that hangs and burns negroes in the South, the same mob that maltreats the Jews in Germany.” For Welles, the heart of the play was the assassination scene, the funeral orations, and the death of Cinna. He ruthlessly cut what followed, eliminating the proscription scene (in which an ascendant Antony and Octavius callously horse-trade over which of their political enemies in Rome they will kill off), and radically reduced Acts four and five to fewer than three hundred lines.

  Welles was focused on fascist Europe, Eustis on Trump’s America. Eustis too retained the scene in which Cinna is assaulted. The part of
the doomed poet was movingly played by Yusef Bulos, a Jerusalem-born actor well into his seventies. In an encounter that evoked recent acts of police brutality across America, he is subjected to a “stop and frisk” and harshly beaten. Eustis also included the proscription scene; in his staging of it, Cinna the poet, assaulted and arrested earlier, is summarily executed along with Trebonius and others either implicated in the assassination of Caesar or unluckily swept up in the crackdown that followed. The final two Acts of the play, while shortened, still ran to roughly nine hundred lines, and the fast-paced production, which ran without an intermission, lasted two hours.

  The show, which began as the sun was setting in Central Park, opened with a brief prelude, a “day-after-the-Hillary-defeat” moment, during which playgoers were invited to walk about the flower-strewn stage and were given markers to share their thoughts on long paper scrolls taped to walls. This somber interlude was interrupted by the arrival onstage of a group of white men wearing red MAKE ROME GREAT AGAIN baseball caps, who proceeded to poster over the handwritten reflections. Someone was shoved and a body went flying (it was as yet impossible to know who was an actor and who a surprised member of the audience). Confused spectators who had wandered onstage were hurriedly ushered off as Flavius, speaking for those on the losing side of the now divided nation, rebuked the celebratory mood of the aggressive newcomers; the opening lines of the play now had a timely edge: “Hence! Home, you idle creatures, get you home! Is this a holiday?” (1.1.1–2).

  Though the play bears his name, Caesar appears in only three scenes (not counting his brief return as a ghost). Eustis made the most of them. Gregg Henry’s Caesar first appears onstage in the play’s second scene, in full campaign mode, waving and smiling, gestures that always drew responsive cheers from the mostly liberal spectators, who were happy to play along (Trump had won less than a fifth of the vote in New York City). Other, nonverbal details further linked Trump and Caesar, and these too were mostly received with smiles or the shock of recognition. In Shakespeare’s text, Caesar asks Antony to touch Calpurnia before he runs in a footrace on the Feast of the Lupercal, to ensure her fertility; Gregg Henry’s Caesar, in demonstrating to Antony what he means, engages in what Trump had referred to as grabbing women “by the pussy.” It was one thing to hear Trump brag about doing it in the notorious Access Hollywood tape; it was another to see a man resembling the president casually grab a woman’s crotch. And it helped motivate a subsequent moment when a Trump-like Caesar reaches back to grab his wife’s hand, only to have it brushed away—Calpurnia’s gesture recalling Melania’s on a tarmac when she was accompanying her husband on a state visit but clearly wanted no part of him at that moment.

  Eustis didn’t have to work very hard to identify Trump with Caesar. Like Caesar, Trump was easily flattered and scornful of political adversaries. Trump’s obsession with his rivals’ appearance gave new weight to Caesar’s remarks about Cassius—“Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous. . . . Would he were fatter” (1.2.194–98). When John Douglas Thompson’s Cassius subsequently ran onstage waving a RESIST banner and wearing one of the pink “pussyhats” worn by thousands of postelection protesters, you could look around the Delacorte and see smiles and nods, as many in the audience made a very personal connection to the action. More than anything else, Caesar’s arrogance uncannily anticipated Trump’s. When he is asked to explain why he refuses to go to the Senate and says “The cause is in my will: I will not come. / That is enough to satisfy the Senate” (2.2.71–72) his petulance almost always provoked laughter. Like Trump, Caesar seemed easily persuaded by the last person who speaks to him. Calpurnia, who partly disrobes and joins a naked and cigar-smoking Caesar in a Trumpian gold-plated bathtub, is relieved after persuading him not to go to the Senate—then looks on helplessly as Decius enters and, with a few flattering words, gets him to change his mind.

  Eustis, who had remained faithful to Shakespeare’s words throughout, decided to add three of his own—or rather Trump’s own. After Casca recounts how Antony thrice offered Caesar a crown, and Caesar refused it, sensitive to how this might appear to the disapproving people, and then swooned, Brutus asks him what happened next. In Shakespeare’s original, Casca recounts how Caesar won over the crowd by saying, “if he had done or said anything amiss, he desired Their Worships to think it was his infirmity” (1.2.269–71). Casca then witheringly adds: “Three or four wenches where I stood cried ‘Alas, good soul!’ and forgave him with all their hearts. . . . If Caesar had stabbed their mothers they would have done no less” (1.2.271–75). Eustis, recalling Trump’s boast during his campaign that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” amended Casca’s words, so that he now said: “If Caesar had stabbed their mothers on Fifth Avenue, they would have done no less.” As Teagle Bougere spoke this line he gestured behind him toward Fifth Avenue, a block or so to the east, collapsing for a moment ancient Rome, Elizabethan London, and the site of the production.

  Until this moment the not-so-subtle hints of a Trump-like Caesar were of a piece: they were played for laughs and highlighted Trump’s bluster. But they had steered clear of Trump’s darker, bullying side that for many Americans rendered him unfit for the office of the presidency. That would change when Caesar, expecting to be crowned, enters the Senate. The audience was primed. Even those who hadn’t recently read or seen the play half-remembered from tenth-grade English classes that his assassination was imminent. Gregg Henry stood at a podium as he recited Caesar’s lines, drifting into self-praise and insisting on his superiority to all those gathered there. When he asks, “What is now amiss / That Caesar and his Senate must redress?” (3.1.32–33), that his recalled Trump’s habit of speaking in proprietary ways (“my generals”). At that point, an Iranian-born woman, Marjan Neshat—the kind of person Trump could never quite treat respectfully—stepped forward and addressed Caesar flatteringly: “Most high, most mighty, and most puissant Caesar, / Metellus Cimber throws before thy seat / An humble heart——” (3.1.34–36 ).

  But before she can finish, Caesar brusquely cuts her off: “I could be well moved, if I were as you” (3.1.59). And working himself up into a tirade, he mocks her “Low-crookèd curtsies, and base spaniel fawning” (3.1.44), accompanying these words with an ugly gesture which he clearly thinks is funny—jerkily flailing his arms and hands—that recalled what for many was the low point of Trump’s presidential campaign, when he mocked the disability of Serge Kovaleski, a New York Times reporter who suffered from a medical condition that impeded the movement of his right arm and hand. For those at the Delacorte who hated Trump, that cruel gesture was a reminder of how sinister a leader he was, the kind on whom you wished the worst. A few moments later, that wish came true. First Casca, then Cassius, Metellus Cimber, and the rest of the conspirators stabbed the Trump-like Caesar as they dragged him down from the podium. As he fought for his life they knifed him repeatedly before Brutus delivered the fatal blow. As Caesar bled out, Brutus sprawled backward, in shock at what he and the others had just done.

  After seeing this riveting scene staged a few times, I turned my attention to how those seated around me were reacting to it. Many were slack-jawed; others covered their faces. Night after night a deathly silence descended on the house. On two occasions that silence was punctuated by the sound of a lone playgoer applauding, in each instance clapping just once or twice, as the pleasure of seeing a fantasy fulfilled was overtaken by embarrassment or shame. I would not have been surprised if on any given night this first sound of clapping might have triggered a groundswell of involuntary applause, much as it does at the end of every theatrical performance. But that never happened. There was just a long and uncomfortable silence.

  That silence was only broken when Cinna at last cried out, “Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead!” (3.1.79). As the conspirators regained their footing, stooping and washing their hands and daggers in Caes
ar’s blood and holding them aloft, something quite unnerving happened, night after night. In ones and twos, outraged playgoers, most of them on the young side, began to stand up and angrily shout about what they were witnessing. Within a short time nearly fifty of them, scattered through the house, were on their feet, waving their fists, shouting recriminations, and expressing outrage. Brutus struggled to be heard above the din. I watched this outburst, as well as the anxiety of some of those seated near the protesters, with interest. Unlike those caught off guard by their outrage, I knew that they were additional cast members that Oskar Eustis had planted throughout the Delacorte. Until now four dozen of them had been sitting quietly, indistinguishable from other actors or from spectators in this modern-dress production. Eustis was not the first director of this play to employ supernumeraries, but he was the first to use them in such a way.

  Eustis had set a trap. He was offering a counterpoint, a rival perspective. It was as if he had slammed on the brakes and 1,800 playgoers were experiencing whiplash. What had we been wishing for? By giving voice to the opposition, he was forcing on playgoers a set of moral questions not unlike those Brutus was struggling with: Do the ends justify the means? How do we reconcile our values with our desires? As Eustis put it in a radio interview during previews: “Brutus is hoping that this assassination will be seen as a liberation. But the moment the knives come out it is a horror show. It is nothing but a horrible tragic event that leads to terrible results. So I don’t have a moment of thinking, ‘I am promoting assassination as a technique or making light of the murder of the leader of the country,’ not at all.”

  That last sentence points to what Eustis understood were the risks of his approach: the resistance, in an increasingly polarized America, to hearing more than one side of a story. In insisting on allowing opposing voices to question the motives of the conspirators, Eustis was staying true to something essential to the play’s handling of Caesar’s assassination, which Shakespeare had set on a razor’s edge. Julius Caesar offers as many arguments justifying the assassination as it does condemning it. Every speech can be read two ways. It boiled down to whom you believed and trusted. As good an argument can be made that Caesar was wrongfully slaughtered as one in support of Brutus’ conclusion that it was better to kill a potential tyrant than allow him to amass power and destroy the republic.