The Drilling Company’s production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar brought to mind the visceral excitement and immediacy that the Elizabethan audiences must have experienced when they first saw this play at the open-air Globe. Presented on a glorious summer night in a Municipal Parking Lot off Ludlow St. in the shadow of a high school and the tenements of the Lower East Side, this was the latest installment of the series which began in 1992. Hamilton Clancy, the Drilling Company’s artistic director, smartly placed the audience—in not-too-comfortable plastic seats—around the crude platform that was the primary performing space with no audience member being more than twenty-five feet from the action. The setting, according to program notes, was moved to the claustrophobic environs of a private school with obvious leadership problems, although this device was soon all but forgotten in the quickly unfolding world of Shakespeare’s colorful language and action. It’s amazing how the passions that Shakespeare tapped can still thrill even when lit by streetlamps.
In addition to changing the locale of the action, Mr. Clancy also chose to do a bit of gender bending, casting Octavius, Mark Antony, Cassius and others as women. That this worked as well as it did is a tribute to these actors and their dedication to Mr. Clancy’s vision of Julius Caesar as a tightly wound, insular drama of warring factions, making both light of Shakespeare’s self-involved characters and showing the irony, and even hypocrisy, of all the heroic, overblown speeches and posturing.
Other concessions to modernity were the usual electronic devices (GPS’s, cell phones, etc.) and the Cassius—by Rebecca Lord-Surratt who also designed the simple setting. In honor of the school setting, letter openers and yardsticks were used as daggers and swords. Clever, if not particularly deadly.
Since the plot of Julius Caesar is well known there’s no need to rehash the details. This version, set as it was in a modern high class private school places the rush of betrayals and political intrigue on a microscope slide, examining the characters with intimate subtlety rather than the usual grand scale. Even though cast members raced about the parking lot all the play’s dialogue was spoken dead center.
Hamilton Clancy played the title character with gravity, while Selene Beretta’s slinky Cassius would have been at home as a foil to James Bond, using all her wiles—and a powerful voice—to sway Brutus (Mark Jeter, in a quietly turmoiled performance) and the others in her plot to overthrow the tyrant Caesar. Ivory Aquino built her Marc Antony slowly, turning her “Friends, Romans” speech into a tour de force of double entendre and evasiveness. Bill Green’s mature Casca gave odd nobility to his confused loyalties; Marianna Caldwell was a hippyish Octavius, hiding a spine of steel; and the wife characters, Leila Okafor as Calpurnia and Joann Sacco as Portia, were played to make us understand that these women were more than meek helpmeets. The rest of the cast—Jared Benn, Jordan Feltner, Brian D. Hill, Amanda C. Fuller, Briana Redmount—were fine with Brandon Reilly bringing a touch of humor to his servant, Lucius and cutie-pie Steven Lee Edwards adroitly singing the folksy “Caesar is Back” to both open and close the play.
The best tribute to this Shakespeare in the Parking Lot Julius Caesar was that virtually every person, from the young hip couples to the down and out, who passed by paused and stayed to hear the play. Considering how hip the Lower East Side has become, this was quite a compliment to Hamilton Clancy and his Drilling Company. The Drilling Company also commissions and performs plays with contemporary themes and gives them the similar, full-bodied stagings, making for a very well-rounded troupe that lives to communicate.
The Drilling Company’s
Shakespeare in the Parking Lot
JULIUS CAESAR by William Shakespeare
Municipal Parking Lot at Ludlow and Broome Streets
New York, NY
Thursdays – Saturdays at 8:00 pm/July 29th – August 14th, 2010
FREE
Information: http://www.shakespeareintheparkinglot.com or 212-873-9050; http://www.drillingcompany.org