Philadelphia Theatre Company presents Shakespeare’s Caesar, adapted by Tyler Dobrowsky

Spare and murky

Adapted by Tyler Dobrowsky and directed by Morgan Green, this is a Caesar that emphasizes spareness to a fault. The typically sprawling Shakespearean cast has been whittled down to four onstage actors. J Hernandez and Matteo Scammel play Cassius and Brutus, respectively, while June Sandy and Jaime Maseda double their parts (Sandy as Caesar and Octavius, Maseda as Antony and Casca). It’s a fine cast of seasoned Shakespearean vets, but they find themselves frequently underserved by the material. Beware the adaptation that claims to trim the text to its bare essentials: Shakespeare illuminates his central characters through the dialogue of the supporting cast, so cutting Messala and Titinius detracts from, rather than adding to, those who are left behind.

This lack of dimensionality trickles through the play’s contemporary setting. In his curtain speech, Dobrowsky name-checks Peter Brook as an inspiring early modernizer of Shakespeare, but the play at hand appears more immediately indebted to Robert Icke, known for his transposition of classical texts to blistering political settings. (Caesar’s opening is almost identical to that of Icke’s recent Oedipus, projecting newsreel footage of its protagonist-as-politician in anticipation of a coming election.)

Where Icke’s translations often find elegant solutions in updating their sources, Caesar handwaves its way through a not-quite-America with an ill-defined political reality. It’s often easy to forgive a modern-dress Shakespeare for any incongruities, but here, the adaptation, not content to simply downsize, adds a few choice lines of its own. Rather than making Caesar king, the Senate is poised to anoint him “Emperor of the Known World”—a cartoonishly broad title that clashes with the show’s otherwise stark realism. The show wants us to view this country as analogous to America, but its odd adaptive choices make this an increasingly impossible ask, the cast all adrift against a murky political backdrop.

Mixed technical elements

Conceptual muddiness aside, the play’s technological elements announce themselves in confused bursts, mostly taking the form of a horizontal array of overhead screens (projections designed by Christopher Ash). “Beware the ides of March” is twice delivered: first by an offstage whisper, second in a bizarre autotuned TikTok that bears no relationship nor resemblance to anything onstage (J.T. Rodney, credited in the program as Cinna the Poet). Portia (Green) awkwardly FaceTimes in, sapping her relationship with Brutus of any of its requisite warmth. One of the few effects that works comes with Antony’s “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech, notable in that it takes a backseat to Maseda’s crisp delivery. The overhead display broadcasts Antony stepping in and out of frame; each time he reenters, you feel the renewed force of his rhetorical efforts.

In addition to the play’s filmic updates, an interpretive strain, suggestive of ritual, runs through the proceedings. Caesar’s assassins bloody their hands in a basin, after he has been stabbed to death; later, the Battle of Philippi is presented as avant-garde dance (choreography by Jungwoong Kim). While visually striking, these moments are far too few to cohere. They sit parallel to the show’s more realist elements; they never coalesce. Absent a more thorough integration, such flourishes can only amount, in the end, to brief curiosities.

Glimpses of a mighty Caesar

These parades of flashy technique continually pull focus from the actors onstage, yet it is when the cast is allowed to perform uninhibited that the show proves most worthwhile. Hernandez plays Cassius to oily perfection, his wheedling sneer a better effect than any of the show’s myriad projections, while Scammell imbues Brutus with the quiet desperation of one being forced to stray from his principles. Their scenes, staged simply by Green against a wide staircase (set designed by Krit Robinson and Kate Campbell), most closely approach the play’s complications, a window into deeply flawed men in a deeply flawed time.

Caesar, unfortunately, is subsumed by adaptation: Sandy’s performance is brief and unwieldy, but Maseda’s Marc Antony rings true with righteous anger. His muscular passion bursts forward from his grief, an elegy for the corruption of his age. We catch glimpses here of a Caesar that could have been, were its time not cut tragically short.