Shakespeare in a Divided America

by James Shapiro

  Coriolanus turns on two conflicts: class warfare within the Roman republic and an ongoing war between the Romans and their enemy, the Volscians. There’s very little actual violence in the play until the end; it’s mostly a battle of ideas. Yet Bannon wasn’t drawn to either the social or international conflicts that Shakespeare had explored. He relocated the story to Los Angeles during the 1992 Rodney King riots and replaced the struggles within Rome, and between Rome and a foreign foe, with inconsequential squabbling between rival street gangs, the Crips and the Bloods. Coriolanus is transformed into a black gang member, a “no bullshit . . . cold killing machine” and enforcer of the Bloods. Though the invitation to the screenplay’s reading promises that the script will “shed light on the continuing subversive effects of racial abuse going back centuries” and “show how the culture of greed, elitism, discrimination and inhumanity repeats itself today in a self-defeating replay of atrocities,” it does nothing of the sort. It caricatures blacks as lazy, thieving, violent, and untrustworthy. It often reads like a parody, veering between pseudo-Elizabethan dialogue and the sort of imaginary black dialect (“let’s unite and don’t gangbang”) that only a racist white guy could invent.

  Bannon briefly flirts with economic populism, introducing from his source a version of an argument against the sort of trickle-down economics long favored by mainstream Republicans: “White folks . . . don’t care for us”; their homes are filled with “nice shit” and they enact laws to help themselves and oppress the poor: “If their wars don’t eat us up”—echoing Shakespeare’s play here—“they will.” But that doesn’t go anywhere. Nor does Bannon’s initial and gauzy idealization of Coriolanus. We first see the hero as an attractive man in his twenties. Yet Bannon never permits this charismatic African American to become a national hero or aspire to a leadership role politically—both of which are defining features of Coriolanus’s role in Shakespeare’s play. It’s nearly impossible to adapt Coriolanus and stray so far from its original premises. Bannon only seems animated when chaos and annihilation threaten. Los Angeles’s worst nightmare is not an earthquake but a pack of violent black men on Harley-Davidsons, descending from the desert, bent on destruction—“bad-ass gangstas.”

  Steve Bannon understood as well as anyone the ideological fault lines that divided Americans. Yet he failed to find any ideological concerns worth projecting onto Coriolanus—including those that have long shaped liberal or conservative interpretations of the play—other than his attraction to the idea of a strongman leader who refuses to be hemmed in. All that remained, once he placed the story amid one of the worst race riots in American history, was chaos and the fear of violent minorities. It may not have been enough to get Hollywood to turn his screenplay into a film, but it tells us something crucial about the man who would lead the alt-right and steer Donald Trump to the presidency. Stoking deep-seated anxieties and rage, rather than engaging in a battle of ideas, was key to that victory.

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  THE AVAILABILITY OF the video clip of a Trump-like Caesar being assassinated (and the fact that the network had been scooped by both Breitbart and the New York Times) made it inevitable that Fox News would weigh in. It did so with a vengeance on that Sunday morning’s Fox & Friends. The odd headline to the story—“NYC Play Appears to Depict Assassination of Trump”—made it seem that for Fox, New York itself rather than William Shakespeare was responsible for this unnamed play. The conclusion to the segment was no less artfully worded, again omitting any mention of Shakespeare or Julius Caesar: “At the end of the day, this is a play put on in Central Park in New York City that very obviously depicts the assassination of a US president.” The Fox & Friends contributors expressed concern that the production might well promote violence against the president and urged viewers to contact the production’s corporate sponsors, naming several of them, including Delta Air Lines and Bank of America.

  Patrick Willingham, executive director of the Public Theater, was on his way to church at the time this segment ran, to hear his partner preach. He never made it. Tom McCann, the Public’s marketing director, called and warned him that threats were pouring in. Corporate sponsors were also being deluged with complaints and warned that they would lose customers if they continued to support the Public Theater. Willingham recalled how he “watched that entire day unspool . . . communicating with Tom, communicating with my board chair, communicating with Bank of America, [and] emailing around Delta.” He managed to reassure a number of corporate sponsors, though by day’s end Delta Air Lines (which had had no problem backing Rob Melrose’s production) had pulled its support. The campaign against the Delacorte production chalked up another victory when the National Endowment for the Arts, fearful of alienating the new president and of having its funding axed by Congress, played it safe. Rather than stand up for freedom of artistic expression, it declared that “no NEA funds have been awarded to support this summer’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar and there are no NEA funds supporting the New York State Council on the Arts grant to Public Theater or its performances.”

  These victories were greeted enthusiastically by Trump’s supporters. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee took to Twitter, offering “Kudos to @Delta for pulling $$ from ‘play’ portraying assassination of @POTUS. No one should sponsor crap like that!” Trump’s two adult sons tweeted as well, Eric thanking Delta—“This was the right thing to do,” and Donald Jr. writing: “I wonder how much of this ‘art’ is funded by taxpayers? Serious question, when does ‘art’ become political speech & does that change things?” Tom McCann recalled that the box office at the Public Theater was getting flooded with so many calls, some of them threatening ones, that “we eventually had to stop taking them and just sent people to a voicemail.” Angry emails poured in as well. One warned: “If ever a Theater should Burn to the Ground, Its Yours.” Another: “I hope the next protests comes with a bang.” It was clear where many had received their marching orders: “Heard about it on TV this morning and saw short clip,” a third one wrote. “Just another display of how ‘low’ we have sunk.” Quite a few, unaware of Rob Melrose’s production, wrote along the lines of: “Imagine the horror & calls to shut down this production if it were an Obama clone being assassinated.” Others were obscene: “Why don’t you scum bag liberal baby killing piles of shit stop provoking violence through your sick garbage adaptation of Shakespeare? You and your shit director should be in prison for hate crimes and threats against the president!”

  The amplification of this campaign through social media led to collateral damage, as staff at other theater companies soon found their in-boxes inundated with threats. Stephen Burdman, whose New York Classical Theatre performed a mile north of the Delacorte in Central Park, reported that “people are Googling ‘Shakespeare in the Park,’ and we come up on the list even though Shakespeare isn’t in our name.” The hateful emails he received had to be unnerving:

  Go fuck yourselves! Every last discusting one of you. I curse every one of you. May you each die a more horrible terrifying death!

  How dare you put in that play about Trump Fuck you and hope hell comes to you all who supported this may You be on ISIS list you disgusting scumbags.

  Burdman was in touch with other alarmed theater companies around the country and recalled that “‘Shakespeare Dallas’ received over 40 very violent emails, like ‘we’re going to come and rape you.’” Threats were being reported in Massachusetts and Washington, DC, and some of the more specific and frightening warnings were passed along to the FBI. It’s hard to believe that all of those who were threatening theaters outside of New York City had so badly misconstrued what they had seen or heard. It seems more likely that some were seizing on the controversy to send a message about what would happen if their local theaters performed anything they deemed offensive.

  The Public Theater rode out the brunt of this initial and mostly online assault. New sponsors stepped in
and civic leaders resisted calls to intervene. Tom Finkelpearl, New York City’s commissioner of Cultural Affairs, made clear that “threatening funding for a group based on an artistic decision amounts to censorship.” “We don’t interfere,” he added, “with the content created by nonprofits that receive public support—period.” But it was obvious that the Public Theater and its supporters had badly underestimated the ways in which they could be targeted through social media, and how little could be done in response.

  During June, Tom McCann told me, Facebook reported that the controversy over Julius Caesar reached more than 2 million people. Twitter reported more than 4.6 million organic impressions, and an average of 35,627 impressions per tweet. Instagram counted 167,669 impressions. Anyone Googling “Julius Caesar Public Theater” could scroll through nearly a million hits, while Inside Edition’s YouTube clip of the Delacorte assassination scene was viewed more than 300,000 times. The Public Theater’s strategy was to maintain a steely silence, letting the production speak for itself and reiterating that it “in no way advocates violence towards anyone.” Eustis, not wanting to breathe new life into the controversy, made only a few public statements, turning down close to two hundred media invitations to speak in defense of the production—a decision he would come to regret.

  He had underestimated “the right-wing media machine” and how expert it had become in “taking a piece of information, creating a false narrative about it, and riling up the masses of people who feel angry and disenfranchised.” He had hoped, he said, for “serious debate over the production, but got instead “a firestorm over ‘fake news’” that “liberals were cheering the assassination of President Trump in Central Park. And this was just a complete lie.” As McCann, who was closely monitoring the online and social media assault, described the seemingly impossible task of refuting it: “How do you fight the troll without becoming the troll itself?”

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  WHILE MARSHALING the outrage of Trump supporters and persuading a few sponsors to distance themselves from the production, those angered by Eustis’s Julius Caesar had failed to stop the show. They only had a few days left to do so before the run came to an end. On June 16, rumors circulated that a reward had been offered to those willing to disrupt one of the last three performances. And, independently, a notice circulated on Facebook urging protesters to assemble at the “Central Park Theater” to “shut down the Public Theater’s offensive production of Julius Caesar.” There was a Central Park Theater not far from the Delacorte, but it was a marionette theater, currently showing The Princess, The Emperor, and the Duck. By the time that crowds gathered to see Julius Caesar, only two gray-bearded protesters holding cardboard signs had shown up at the Delacorte, and there were dark jokes by some of the nervous staff expressing concern for those marionettes.

  The rumors of protest-for-pay were true. Mike Cernovich, a prominent far-right activist best known for promoting the bizarre Pizzagate conspiracy theory (which claimed that members of Hillary Clinton’s campaign ran a child sex ring out of the basement of a DC restaurant), was offering a $1,000 “prize” to each of the first ten people who would disrupt the Delacorte performance “where Trump is assassinated.” He urged his followers to all attend the same evening. Ideally, he said, somebody would stand up every minute or so, shouting or displaying a sign that read “CNN is ISIS,” or “Bill Clinton is a rapist.” “Let them know,” he added, “that this play is terrorism.” But it was essential to “get it on video . . . We need you Periscoping, videoing and everything.” CNN? Clinton? ISIS? Terrorism? It is hard to imagine a more irrelevant list of ideological or moral objections to the show. But Cernovich understood his viewers well; what mattered was recycling slogans familiar to Trump’s base. The crucial thing was not what was said but ensuring that the stunt would circulate on social media.

  The escalating threats were taken seriously by law enforcement authorities. Behind the scenes the FBI and New York City’s Criminal Intelligence Bureau were monitoring the situation and by the end of the run thirty Park Rangers, sixty New York City police officers, a handful of detectives, and sixteen Public Theater security guards were on site for every performance. The Delacorte was an especially vulnerable space—the price paid for being designed as an open-air, communal theater, with no barrier between actors and audience. Those in the house who were determined enough could race from their seats and attack the actors onstage in a few seconds, before security waiting in the wings could intervene. I was told by Jeremy Adams, general manager of the Public Theater, that some of the actors had received death threats. There weren’t many exits either—it had been built to 1938 code—so the audience was at risk if something more catastrophic occurred. Security teams scurried through the house when spotting what looked like a potential weapon. For the final nights of the run, the Public decided to break with long-standing policy and not distribute the last free tickets to those waiting on long standby lines. Bag searches were instituted.

  Friday, June 16, was especially humid. The actors would have to deal with that, along with the swarms of insects attracted to the stage lights, the distraction of helicopters buzzing overhead, and the random appearance of the raccoons who for several generations had made their home in the Delacorte. But this evening they would also have to cope with people threatening them in a very personal and terrifying way. “If the actors are going to kill trump on stage,” one of the emails sent to the Public Theater read, “maybe they should be killed.” It took a lot of focus—and a lot of guts—for the actors to expose themselves to that danger.

  The show began uneventfully. But at the end of the assassination scene, as the conspirators, holding aloft bloody knives, stood looking at each other, and Casca at last cried out, “Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead!” (3.1.79), a young woman suddenly left her seat and made her way onstage. The play stopped as she filmed herself shouting, “Stop the normalization of political violence against the Right! This is unacceptable.” A playgoer with a thick Brooklyn accent shouted back: “Get off the stage.” The disruption turned out to be coordinated, for an accomplice, a man in his thirties, was already standing and filming her.

  Nobody knew what she intended to do next. The actor who was closest—Marjan Neshat—moved swiftly to confront the intruder and block her from the rest of the company. Stagehands quickly appeared and interposed themselves. It took another few seconds before a security team took over and escorted her off, as she continued to shout, “Shame on all of you, shame.” As she was led away—at this point perhaps thirty seconds had passed—her accomplice started shouting, “You are all Nazis like Joseph Goebbels, you are all Goebbels. You are inciting terrorists.” Like many of those who heard him, I was confused, because it sounded like he was saying, “You are all gerbils.” It was a very strange moment, as playgoers turned to each other, asking, “gerbils?” He too was led off, now shouting that the blood of Steve Scalise (a Republican congressman who had been shot and badly wounded earlier that week, at a congressional baseball game) was on our hands.

  Only a minute or two had passed. But the spell of the drama had been broken, and the actors stood about, unsure what to do. A calm and familiar voice was next heard through the sound system; it belonged to Buzz Cohen, the unassuming stage manager who had been shepherding shows at the Delacorte for decades: “Will the actors pick up from ‘Freedom and Liberty’?” It’s the kind of prompt the actors had heard from her hundreds of times during the long rehearsal period and they responded to it reflexively. The effect on everyone in the house was electrifying. The audience stood as one and cheered. I’ve never experienced anything like it in a theater.

  The action resumed—only to be interrupted moments later by the dozens of faux protesters, who, on cue, began standing up and shouting at the conspirators, calling their actions into question. Though I knew that they were actors, it still came as a jolt; for those not in the know, it was unsettling, and for a few (I could se
e) quite terrifying. The security forces that had gathered in the wings, ready to respond to further threats, began to move on these planted protesters and had to be restrained by those who worked for the Public. (On subsequent nights the actors scattered through the house were told that they could quietly reassure playgoers panicked by their protests that they were only acting.) The performance ran without further interruption until the final ovation.

  For a long time, though, the young woman who had disrupted the performance stood outside the Delacorte, yelling loud enough to distract the actors, before she was finally arrested for criminal trespass. It turns out that she badly needed to be taken into custody, having set up in advance a link to which supporters could send her money for her legal defense. She turned a tidy profit. Later that week she appeared on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox, where she defended her trespass on the grounds that she “was protecting the president’s life.” Listening to the mock-elitist accent with which Hannity pronounced “Shakespeah in the Park,” I began to fear that the Right was now willing to abandon Shakespeare as irredeemably elitist, bringing to an end a vital, two-centuries-long tug-of-war over his plays in America. The young woman’s accomplice was also interviewed on Fox and claimed that “this Manhattan Central Park crowd was on their feet cheering—they were cheering as an actor dressed as the president was stabbed to death.” They had in fact cheered—but not then and not for that. Ben Shapiro, a free speech advocate, was the only conservative voice to speak out against “these idiots who stormed the stage,” calling their actions “snowflakery.”