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By JOSEPH PLUMMER; Times Leader Correspondent
Thursday, October 06, 1994 Page: 9C QUICK WORDS: REVIEW: STAGE
Eight actors breathed new life into a Shakespearean warhorse on the bare
stage of the Dorothy Dickson Darte Center earlier this week, in a lean,
violent production of “Julius Caesar” that left togas and Corinthian columns
back in the stable.
A near-capacity crowd seemed to love it.
After all, where can you see a production of Jullus Caesar these days? We
bowed before it in high school (“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your
ears!”), but when we longed to see it we had to content ourselves with the old
Brando movie, or perhaps a school production here and there if the schools’
activities budget could pay for the costumes and scenery.
But the National Shakespeare Company has swept its stage clean. The
32-year-old New York-based NSC made its first stop on a national tour Monday
night at the Darte Center, a tour that includes “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
along with “Caesar.”
Five men and three women played all the parts on a bare stage, costume
fragments suggesting rather than replicating Roman dress. The absence of
scenery left us at the mercy of the text, which the actors seemed to
re-invent, finding new rhythms in mime and space, writhing and marching
through space in the godless world of ancient Rome, playing Julius Caesar as
if for the first time — with a kind of experimental, off-Broadway flair.
Boy, did it work.
The battle scenes, which sag in many productions of the tragedy, came alive
in this one. Director Greg Lombardo choreographed them in the fashion of
Balinese stick-fighting with percussive accompaniment, the actors moving in a
balletic way. Suddenly we had a kind of ritualistic hand-to-hand combat on the
plains of Phillipi, far more thrilling than the lumbering, armor-laden
traditional manner of depicting on-stage Shakespearean warfare.
Lombardo staged the assassination itself as a bloodbath worthy of “Natural
Born Killers,” as conspirator after conspirator plunged their knives into
Caesar 33 times.
The director was fortunate in his choice of Jason Thomas Oates to play
Brutus, the Stoic center of the tragedy who often becomes more static than
Stoic. Oates’ temperament was ideally suited to the difficult role, allowing
him to balance the raging fury of Patrick Burchill’s Cassius and yet express a
passion all his own. Their tent-scene quarrel in the second act had just the
right mix of wrath and repose, helping us recall that, for all the first-act
rhetoric, it is one of Shakespeare’s finest dramatic scenes.
The NSC goes from here to Hudson, NY, and then on the suburbs of Bal