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.

Some Things Don't Need To Be Discussed

I dreamt last night that I was Walter White. Walt is not a happy person to be at this point in Breaking Bad , and my unwaking self endured the full brunt of his fear. I was Walt, hat and beard and panicky, sinister cleverness and all, racing cross-country in hiding, dodging the police by just a few steps, wondering if I had enough bullets left to settle my problems or if I would have to figure out a way to buy more without being recognized. I mention this not just to brag about how exciting my dreams are—and they are fabulous—but to point out that Breaking Bad  has become embedded not just in our collective unconscious, but in my private one too. So why don't we just shut up about it?

This is the best moment in history to be making television, and the worst to talk about it. Each week, tens of thousands of words are churned out about the hot TV topic of the moment—whether it's Breaking Bad  or Mad Men  or last season's hit drama Complaining About Mad Men —in recaps, podcasts, think pieces, and commentary shows produced by the networks themselves. Each moment of the show is picked over, retold, argued about and pondered, again and again until, by the time "Last Week On Breaking Bad " rolls around, the previous show has grown stale in our mouths. It is the single greatest act of collective, instantaneous criticism that has ever happened, and I think it's too much for one TV show to bear.

Breaking Bad  is a crime drama. This is my literary turf. I think crime dramas have endless appeal, both for their comforting repetitiveness and for the art that comes from exploiting that repetition, but I've also found that writing seriously about them is not always a good idea. In college I wrote a paper about The Killer Inside Me , Jim Thompson's most literary novels, and one of his best. Despite that book's surprising amount of literary merit, though, I found it was a tough paper to get through. Stories of suspense do not demand much intellectual underpinning, which is why I like them. But when a novel's foundation is 90% plot, the critical structure you can build on it can only get so high before it collapses, and your teacher thinks you an idiot. 

So, the best way to appreciate crime is to read it, muse on it, and let it go. Suspense television is the same way.    The plotting in Breaking Bad  is intricate and brilliant, but great plotting is rarely more than a clever trick. Delving into it for hundreds or thousands of words at a time—something practiced by traffic-hungry publications who should know better—is the critical equivalent of explaining a joke. The trolls who haunt the comment sections of these godforsaken bits of writing are even more misguided. Take the top comment on this week's Vulture recap by Matt Zoller Seitz, the gold standard in overly literal recaps. From Jake_M:

I’d like to believe that the opening sequence for episode 5.09, skaters in empty pool, the opening for the final eight episodes, is important. There are 4 persons at the pool. Two skaters performing/playing, one person videotaping the performance, and one person sitting on the edge of the empty pool, watching the performance.  

What if this is a sketch of the defining moment in Walts tragedy as he sees it. That he was reduced to be a spectator in every way to the succes of Gretchen and Elliott. That they got the succes, happiness and attention he was cheated for and believed he deserved. That their wrongdoing, in Walts mind, propelled him into all these catastrofic events in life. Then it seems probable that the ricin he is collecting is intended for G and E.

 "I'd like to believe ___________ is important" is the watchword for all those who demand too much from their TV. Of course we want to believe it's important, because otherwise, why did we waste so many hours watching it, thinking about it, dreaming about it? But TV is better when it isn't weighed down with the importance of being the only healthy area of American mass culture. Suspense shows are mostly plot, and everything else—bits of great acting, characterization, and directing—are morsels to be savored, and savored quietly. 

A year or two ago, I quit reading anything anybody wrote about Mad Men . That includes recaps, obviously, but also more pieces to which more care was paid: interviews and historical nitpickings and deep unpackings of all the little symbols that Matthew Weiner shoves wherever they will fit. My enjoyment of the show skyrocketed. As we stumble towards the finale of Breaking Bad , I suggest doing the same thing. (Right after the end of this paragraph.) It's a beautifully constructed piece of television. Turn down the outside noise, and you might actually be able to hear it.

"Smash" is Awful And So Is My TV Recapping

Buzzfeed is on a good roll right now. This week's piece about how media reporting has changed for the worse generated a whole bucketful of discussion, including this borderline manifesto from Tom McGeveran, of Capital New York. Because I'm only a pretend reporter, I'll refrain from throwing in my opinion on the shift in media reporting. But, as a pretend reporter, I have massive opinions on pretend things—like Smash. The Buzzfeed article that most amused me this week was about that show's trainwreck of a first season, and the bitter behind-the-scenes feuds that led to its trainwreckiness. 

I've got tons of opinions about that—mainly that, while the article is brilliant, I suspect that Rebeck isn't the monster it makes her out to be—and you can read them here. I have also, for the sake of linkbait SEO metric development (LSEOMD), included a TV recap. Because my girlfriend will make her ANGRY GIRLFRIEND face at me if I watch the entire show, I have restricted my viewing to the first sixty seconds. Ahem:

:01—Apparently this episode is called “On Broadway.” I know that because there’s a title card that says “On Broadway.”

:05—It’s Katherine McPhee! Dressed up as Marilyn! In black and white! She still doesn’t look the part; she still can’t sing. I wonder if the whole season will be in black and white. That would be a poor decision of Rebeckian proportions.

:19—It’s not black and white any more. Rats.

:22—Marilyn McPhee is singing a song inside of what appears to be a diner. Presumably she is on stage…possibly on stage on Broadway? Hopefully the other people are dancers who can dance better than she can, and I will get to watch them dance.

:39—I did not get to see any dancing…yet. A title card has informed me that this is the Boston closing night. This show will never reach Broadway! Or will it?

:46—All of the actors are running around backstage, presumably to avoid the extreme McPheedium of this first sixty seconds. Almost over now, guys!

:51—Now I see dancing!

1:00—There was a shot outside the theater of K. McPhee giving M. Hilty a dirty look. I guess those two haven’t made up during the off-season! How nice to know that that tedious rivalry will continue into season two. McPhee’s song continues, still blandly bland, and I turn the TV off when the timer hits sixty. The last thing I hear is, “And if a duckling never swims, she’ll never become a swaaaaaaaan.”

Phew. That's enough for me. If this feature proves as linkbait awesome traffic driver viral game changer (LATDVGC) as I hope it will, perhaps it will become a weekly thing. But probably not.