Like most of Shakespeare’s history-inspired plays, “Julius Caesar” usually requires a long sit. Do the text word for word and the bloody tale of politics, ambition and back-stabbing co-workers clocks in at close to three hours. That’s decidedly not the “Julius Caesar” opening in previews Sept. 1 at Glencoe’s Writers Theatre. By slashing the politically charged tragedy to roughly 100 minutes, and no intermission, you could say that the adaptation by acclaimed Shakespearian actor Scott Parkinson and Writers Theatre’s Artistic Director Michael Halberstam has (to poach from the dialogue) “a lean and hungry look.”
“Hit ’em hard, hit ‘me fast,” says Madrid St. Angelo, who plays the title character. “There’s a simplicity and an intensity to this adaptation that I find timely and disturbing completely enthralling. It’s all about power, and people’s obsession with it, and how far they’ll go to get it and keep it.”
Spoiler alert: If you don’t know what happened on the Ides of March, 44 B.C., stop reading now.
Despite getting star billing in the title, Julius Caesar doesn’t last much past the first half of “Julius Caesar.” Shakespeare scholars and theater critics alike have found the play wanting once the knife-wielding conspirators have done their worst and Rome becomes plunged into a war. The Writers Theatre adaptation addresses that criticism.
“I feel like once the play goes to war, we get introduced to a lot of characters we haven’t had a chance to invest in properly. They’re just kind of sketched in,” says Parkinson. “In the last two acts especially, the experience of the play can be a bit muddied for contemporary audiences.”
Most of the de-muddying adaptive work is in those last two acts, when the story hones in on Brutus (Kareem Bandealy), and Cassius (Parkinson) as well as Marc Antony (Thomas Vincent Kelly) and Octavius Caesar (Sydney Germaine). The relationship between these four form the nexus for the latter portion of the piece. The goal, Parkinson says, was to streamline the storytelling, give audiences a bigger emotional payoff and illuminate the ways that intimate, personal choices can ripple out to impact the wider world.
“The blind spots that these characters have about themselves and those closest to them leads then into questionable decision making,” Parkinson says, “(Their) choices have ramifications far beyond the domestic situation where they originate — out onto a national and even global scale.”
Staging “Julius Caesar” in an election year means that it’s all but impossible not to see contemporary events in the double-dealings and political gamesmanship of ancient Rome. “From the minute we started talking about doing this, every conversation referenced what’s happening in the country today,” Parkinson says, “Certainly Caesar’s arrogance is something we might be able to ascribe to one candidate or other of your choice.”
Election year or no, the timelessness of Shakespeare is as undeniable as it is tough to describe, he adds.
“Every time you want to talk about what makes Shakespeare great, you feel like you’re going to say something horribly clichéd or that somebody else has said far better. I would say Shakespeare writes about the mundane experiences that are common to us all in a way that touches something deeply in our souls, collectively and individually.”
Writers Theatre presents, ‘Julius Caesar’
When: Sept. 7-Oct. 16
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Where: Writers’ Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe
Contact: 847-242-6000; www.writerstheatre.org