Loud And Proud And Also Loud: Julius Caesar In Dumbo

A few weeks ago, I took in a bit of Shakespeare near the Brooklyn waterfront, screwing my bladder to the sticking place along the way.  My review of the Donmar Warehouse's production of Julius Caesar is up today at Howlround, and you can read it if you like.

In the teeming yard of an English prison, a convict named Brutus tries to get the attention of a gang of joggers. He speaks of love and honor and fairness, finally winning their approval with a simple question: "Had you rather Caesar were living and die all slaves," he asks them, "than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men?" From the vantage of the prison yard, a single death is a small price for freedom. But as Brutus and his throng soon learn, the transaction is not so simple.

The Donmar Warehouse's Julius Caesar premiered in London last December, and has been imported to Brooklyn to play in a warehouse of our own: St. Ann's, a half a block from the East River in Dumbo. This all female production, directed by Phyllida Lloyd, is set in a women's prison, and uses that harsh setting to remake itself into a meditation on the nature of freedom. Compelling but flawed, it is a fine example of the benefits and drawbacks that come with using Shakespeare to make a point about something larger than the play itself.

I walked away from that production feeling very good about it, and wrote the review in that mood. But this was not a love that lasted. The more I thought about the production's noisy tricks, the less I was impressed. Most of the acting was superb, and the first half of the play—when the production's premise was still unclear—was discomfiting in an interesting way. But what's stuck with me over the last couple of weeks is the noisiness of the production, and the shallow flashiness that seemed design to deafen the audience and drown out the text.

I had complex feelings about this production, and wanted that to come through in the review, but reading over my words, I worry that they sound a little too sunny. There are very good things in this Julius Caesar, but they come in spite of the production itself. Even so, I'm glad I saw it, and I'm glad I spent the last two weeks wrestling with the way I felt about it. A perfect production (if there were such a thing) could never make you think the way an ambitious, badly flawed one can.

Questions of Comfort, At The Theater & In The Loo

The performance begins at 7:00 PM and runs 2 hours and 15 minutes without an intermission. . . . We strongly recommend that you use the restrooms at Brooklyn Roasting Company. The St. Ann’s Warehouse restrooms will only be available immediately prior to the start of the performance. For the safety of our audiences and actors, there will be no re-entry to the theater if you have to leave your seat during the performance. There will be no intermission. 

So I was informed this week by an email confirmation of a ticket to the Donmar's Julius Caesar, at St. Ann's Warehouse, which is playing this month just a half block for the East River. This is not a review of the performance—that will come on Howlround, I think, sometime this month—but rather of the particular bit of anxiety engendered by that email. 

 "Two hours fifteen?" it made me think. "No bathroom? Jeez."

(Be here warned that this post acknowledges certain facts of human biology—namely that sometimes men and women have to go to the bathroom.) 

I've been wary of theatrical bathroom problems since February, when I made the mistake of having a couple of beers before Good Person of Szechwan at La Mama. The beers ran right through me, as beers have a way of doing, and I spent the first act of that lovely show in squirming agony, like a five year-old on a road trip with Mitt "No Bathroom Breaks" Romney. Thankfully, that show had an intermission, and I was able to enjoy the second half in comfort. Julius Caesar would offer no such escape hatch. 

We are grown ups, of course, and can control our bladders, but that doesn't mean it's very much fun to do so. Coffee, tea, beer and cigarettes are all wonderful things to have before a play, and all are diuretics. Being told that you have to hold it for two hours plus, I think, is a mental diuretic as well. 

A few hours before curtain on Saturday, I set aside my tea, and looked away from any offers of beer. Water, I sipped sparingly. A trip to the theater had turned into the night before surgery. This proved moot, however, when I reached the theater, and found out that all of my nervous skittering had overlooked an important fact: my ticket was for Sunday, not Saturday. This was a particularly boneheaded mistake, as you could see if you looked at my datebook, which contained exactly one item for the entire week of Nov. 30 to Oct. 6: "Julius Caesar," it said, on Sunday. But who bothers looking at their datebook?

The front of house staff was gracious, and offered to seat me that night for the performance beginning an hour later than I had thought, but I decided I'd rather have my Saturday to myself, and went home. I repeated my procedure Sunday, scorning anything that might later cause a tickle in my bladder, and by the time I arrived at the gloomy Brooklyn waterfront, mouth and bladder were both stone dry. St. Ann's had set up a makeshift lobby inside the adjacent Brooklyn Roasting Company—a cruel gag for those who were about to have their restroom rights stricken—and the winding line for the bathrooms had the nervous buzz of the crowd waiting for the last helicopter out of Saigon. 

I waited by the river—where some civic art-minded goon had thoughtfully woven plastic strips through a chain link fence, obscuring the view of the skyline and Manhattan Bridge—and listened as the Pirates took a 3-2 lead over the Cardinals, on vital sacrifice fly. They were still leading when the Donmar company, dressed as prison wardens, herded us into the space. "There are toilet facilities on the left," they told us, "and we suggest you use them now." Truly, theatergoing is a romantic pursuit.  Behind me, a grizzled Englishman announced, "It's a fucking prison, shut the fuck up. I don't want to live the experience, I just want to watch it."

The auditorium had been given a jailhouse makeover. The seats were plastic, armless and hard, and the only air conditioning was a few ceiling fans which seemed to have no more than ceremonial value. I'm not usually one to whine about a theater, but the seats, heat and explicit prohibition of bathroomery perplexed me. Where is the line between pampering your audience and abusing them? How long can a play get before the value gained by not having an intermission is outweighed by the distracting effects of stiff backs, jittery legs, and overfull bladders? (90 minutes, as far as I'm concerned.)

The Donmar's Julius Caesar moves quickly, and 2:15—or actually 2:00 flat, since that :15 was built in to allow the crowd time to get settled—is wonderfully short Shakespeare. But in a play that breaks so easily into halves—"Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war" is as good an act-out as any in the canon—it seems silly to risk losing your plastic chair-tortured audience by refusing them a chance to stand and stretch their legs. The honorable deaths of Cassius and Brutus, it seems to me, will not make much of an impression on an audience member whose ass is numb.

It could be that I'm making something out of nothing. Last night's crowd survived intact, save for one man who was overcome just before Caesar's assassination, and scurried out towards the bathroom, never to return. When the lights went up at the end of the performance, the grizzled Englishman leapt to his feet, and let out a war whoop of approval. A good play can make you forget discomfort, and this Julius Caesar largely manages. It's a compelling production, but a fiendishly uncomfortable one. Leave your sweater at home, skip the coffee, and bring a bottle of water—to sip on, and never gulp.

On Shakespeare Day, Eulogies From Hamlet & Marlena

It doesn't take much prodding for me to praise Orson Welles. The man was the original studio system martyr—a dynamo whose personality made him irresistible, and also made it impossible for him to get work. He was always fun to watch on screen—I mean, just look at that grin!—​but the man knew how to write, too. I've been thinking about Touch of Evil​ a lot lately. Not the famous opening tracking shot, nor the inexplicably less famous second tracking shot, but the ending, which never fails to give me chills.

​Orson's corrupt sheriff, a sinister fat man whose weight Welles was not more than a decade away from, lies face down, dead in a gully. Marlene Dietrich, the mealy-mouthed fortune teller who was the only person who liked him, watches on, stone faced, and delivers the finest movie eulogy of all time. "He was some kind of man. What does it matter what you say about people?"

The ending's ambivalence ​recalls that of The Third Man​. The monster, both played by Orson Welles, is dead—killed by the only man in the world who loved him. Just in case he's feeling a little bit too good about his crusade, though, the dead man's woman makes sure he knows that he hasn't done anything great. Yeah, you killed the bad guy. But the bad guy was Orson Welles, dammit, and he was the most fun part of this movie!

But it also recalls a couple of Shakespearean eulogies, one of which I was reminded of this morning by Super Theater Twitter Guy Jonathan Mandell.​

"He was a man. Take him for all in all. I shall not look upon his like again." (Hamlet) Shakespeare, born 439 years ago today.

— Jonathan Mandell (@NewYorkTheater) April 23, 2013

​There are a lot of ways to deliver that line, which Hamlet uses to remember the murdered father whom he is about to kinda-maybe-sorta-think about avenging. Taken with Dietrich's Central European ambivalence, it offers the same, "I don't know—what's the point of mourning the dead?" shrug. If Hamlet is that ambivalent to his father, well, I get why he's not racing to the armory in search of an uncle killing sword.

I saw Julius Caesar​ at BAM a couple of weeks ago. It's a lush production, fuzzy at the start, but furiously clear by the time the murderin' starts. At the end, when the stage is covered with the traditionally Shakespearean corpse-pile, we get this eulogy, over the corpse of Brutus: "His life was gentle, and the elements/So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up/And say to all the world 'This was a man!'"

​I love it. I don't know how these all connect, exactly, and I won't force it. But I do know that if the best you can say for the dead is, "Well...he was a man," perhaps the eulogy business is not for you. The press release for Julius Caesar​ touted it as something revolutionary, but an all-black Shakespearean tragedy set in tropical climate is hardly new. Orson Welles did that with Macbeth​ in 1936, a reminder that while he may have been a few hundred years behind Shakespeare, he was decades ahead of everyone else.

Just for grins, I looked up the Times'​ original review of Welles so-called "voodoo Macbeth.​" It is, how shall we say, really fucking racist. Critic Brooks Atkinson—he of the eponymous theater—tells us that the cast in this "darktown version" of Shakespeare's tragedy "have conjured [a] weird, vari-colored raree-show out of the fine stuffs of the theatre and the ferocity of Negro acting." The costumes are "an idealization of Negro extravagance," and the staging is done "with an eye to the animalism of the setting." But though the play offers "sensuous, black-blooded vitality," it "has missed the sweep and scope of a poetic tragedy." This is my favorite bit (emphasis mine)​:

As Macbeth, Jack Carter is a fine figure of a Negro in tight-fitting trousers that do justice to his anatomy. He has no command of poetry or character.

Oof.​ Just...oof.

There's been quite a lot of chatter lately—and probably for decades—about the death of theater criticism. Asked to eulogize the golden age of New York criticism, I can't give anything more than a Dietrichian shrug. What does it matter what you say about plays?