Who here is so base that would be a bondman?: Julius Caesar @ St Ann's Warehouse

“Light black, from pole to pole…” 

 - Endgame 

If you’re going along to the Donmar/St Ann’s Warehouse to see Julius Caesar, and you’ve ordered your tickets already, you’ll get an email telling you to pick up your tickets at the coffeehouse next door. That’s because the production extends to the sidewalk, and they’ve had to move the box office because of it. Pick up your tickets in the coffeehouse, but you may wish to skip the coffee -- the play runs 2+ hours with no intermission, and if you leave you won’t get back in again.

Shortly before curtain time you’ve joined a crowd on the sidewalk, faced with a blank steel overhead door. The door opens, and uniformed people tell you to have your ticket out and visible. The crowd moves into the entranceway, and you are in a long, institutional staging area, with prison signage and a security monitor, facing another blank steel overhead door as the one behind you closes, leaving half the audience outside. You, it turns out, are in the First Group. From a raised platform ahead, a guard informs you of the rules – first, to take out your cell phones and turn them off. (And that’s probably the first performance ever since the advent of cellphone ubiquity that one hasn’t gone off in medias res, so maybe all theater performances from now on should start in holding areas with prison guards). For the rest, bathrooms to the right, no re-entry on leaving, no photography or recording devices, etc., -- mostly standard theater boilerplate except, of course, for the mode of delivery. Then the second door opens and in you go to find your seats.

Since there are no ushers, but only guards, it kind of inclines you to go find your seat on your own. If you ask them, they will point, but they won’t show you to your seat – whether you end up in the right place or not is not their problem. (They also won’t truncheon you for asking, though.) What they’re pointing at is a set of clanky steel risers with blue plastic chairs. These chairs will contribute to that feeling you have at the end of the play that you actually have been truncheoned by an usher.

Guards circulate as the Second Group is let in. Occasionally they will reseat someone (especially if you’re front row center, expect to be moved at some point because they need your chair to murder Caesar in). Once you’re seated you realize you’ve just crossed the stage to get there – hence the no re-entry rule. You’re facing a grey cinderblock wall, with the gateway you just came through on the left, to the right of that a more elaborate high-security prison door, and to the right of that the windows of a c & c station, with more monitors and a guard. Above is a balcony reached by ladders and a stairway. The color scheme is grey with highlights – Caesar’s black trenchcoat, the prisoners’ yellow undershirts, blue plastic guns, red rubber gloves. The lighting is blue-spectrum flourescent bulbs and only slightly warmer followspots like searchlights.

Carpe scaenam 

Much has been made of the fact that it’s an all-woman cast, and the reviews have more often than not had a slightly nervous aura, as if this were all somehow vaguely subversive and possibly dangerous. Which of course it is, I suppose. Nobody gets twitchy when Propeller drags up, because that’s Historically Informed Performance (sort of), but this is girls armed with swords and meter, enacting fate and civil war, and what isn’t freaky about that?

But what the casting does here is shift Shakespeare’s gendered language from one class of representation to another. So if Portia says she has “a man’s mind but a woman’s heart”, that ends by meaning something only in a remoter sense -- like the word “Roman” to a bunch of people in a room in Brooklyn, these words become historical abstracts, lent their meaning only by the descriptors that surround them. We get a more visceral understanding of Portia when she flashes her celtic knotwork bicep tat and declares herself Cato’s daughter in no uncertain terms.

What the prison setting does is give the cast a costuming substrate that effectively effaces gender. It’s a pretty brilliant solution to a problem that would otherwise leave a director a decision between changing characters’ genders (a la recent Tempests), or making it effectively a drag show (as I find all-male productions usually are). Everything layered onto prison-grey sweats, whether it be military greatcoats, berets, and balaclavas, or shawls, skirts, and silk bathrobes, is more prop than costume, and so you end by focusing more on words, movement, the physicalities of the actors. In the end, it means the difference between women playing men who are these characters, and women playing these characters. Or rather, actors playing women who are playing these characters.

 And this is a pretty remarkable group of actors, and I’ll enthuse about that more in the next bit. Meantime, Happy New Year, pagans!

Addendum: Hey, some video!