Vilma Silva begins the performance of Julius Caesar at OSF by informing us that she will be playing the title character. With the help of other cast members, she then rehearses the audience in cheers that we are to shout when we see a gesture of two raised hands during the performance. You know, "Hail Caesar!"
I despise "audience participation" gimmicks that assume audiences come to the theater aspiring to be Pavlov's dogs and join in as told to, rather than observe the drama. But some inventive uses of the device as in Richard Schechner's memorable Dionysus in 69 give it a thematic purpose; and director Amanda Dehnert has a trick in mind here. Led by onstage characters, the audience jumps up and cheers on cue several times; but after Caesar's bloody murder and Anthony's great mood-changing speech, when the conspirators give the gesture and seek approval, no one applauds no one in the audience, and no one onstage. The killers weakly try the gesture again with no more success.
Bolstered by illustrations all around the theater of famed murdered leaders (some of them also famed murderers), this version of Shakespeare's tragedy explores the consequences of revolution and violence, as Dehnert says, "when we decide to take our nation into our own hands." Much of it is inventive and sometimes even thrilling.
But it is one thing to reinterpret Shakespeare, and another to clumsily rewrite him. Because Caesar is here played as a woman, not just by one, this play changes all the nouns and pronouns until [with several more actresses playing men] it gets confusing to hear all those "she"s and "her"s. Then there's Portia, who has to repeatedly assure Brutus that though she is a woman she is strong after all that carrying-on about the powerful female tyrant Caesar. But the final misstep is not only to rewrite and alter the script but to completely cut out the major role of Caesar's wife, Calpurnia. Couldn't she have also changed gender and become Calpurnio? Vilma Silva is not a particularly commanding or forceful-seeming Caesar, but she can command the stage and provide a central focus, as the staging not only brings Caesar back as a ghost, as usual, but keeps her onstage as a symbolic presence through much of the play after the murder. There's some nice imagery in stabbing and showing a bloody robe with Caesar actually not in it but standing nearby. Jonathan Haugen's Brutus is manly but more politician than the usual plain, good man trapped in conspiracy. Gregory Linington's Cassius seems to emphasize the man's anger and competitiveness more than his scheming, and is a compelling portrait, though his contemporary-sounding delivery is really out of synch with the more classical playing of the others. And Danforth Comins rises to Mark Anthony's powerful address to Caesar's corpse with thrilling emotion and then manipulates the mob almost too amusingly in his famous "Friends, Romans, Countrymen" address; but in the later scenes, he seems a standard leading man and loses character. The other actors all play multiple roles. Anthony Heald creates several striking moments, especially as Cinna the Poet, and his wonderfully expressive face really helps to emphasize the crowd's changing emotions. And Frankie J. Alvarez is touching as Brutus' servant Lucius. For me, this mixture of inspired artistry and foolish missteps seemed the perfect sample of what heights this splendid theater organization can reach and how unchecked its path can be.
