Julius Caesar

The Loeb's commencement production of Julius Caesar is, as Brutus might say, indeed ambitious. Director Daniel Seltzer parades a huge cast (playing eighty parts) across the cavernous main stage, dresses them in sumptuous costumes, mixes them together in mob scenes and battles, and supplements it all with a broad range of lighting and sound effects. But if his effort is ambitious, the result is at best uneven; Seltzer's Caesar is at times taut, at times grotesque, most often flat.

Despite the play's grandiose scale, its best moments--and there are a number of good ones--come when the leads can shed the crowds, stop bellowing with all stops out, and play to one another as if they are, after all, really people. Brutus (Mark Bramhall) and Cassius (Thimas Weisbuch) are at their best in the confrontations both before and after Caesar's murder. In the first act, Weisbuch's wily Cassius, his eyes darting, his manner at once servile and cunning, convincingly lures Brutus into the conspiracy. And the meeting of the two great liberators who have become petulant scrapping boys comes alive as well.

Brutus is also moving when, unnerved, he parries Portia's pleas in the stormy night before the assassination. (Bramhall has become much more modulated than he was last April when a CRIMSON reviewer criticized him for playing at full intensity throughout.)

But such scenes are all too few. They soon give way to the hollow, uneasy attempts to recreate the magnitude of Roman politics. David Ritten-house as Antony acts with subtlety and feeling when he faces the conspirators immediately following the murder: he expresses both his love for Caesar and a diplomatic respect for the assassins. But if this relatively modest scene has in it all that is good about Caesar, what follows reveals all that is bad.

In the "friends, Romans, country-men" scene, Ritten-house is forced to shout at full voice for about five minutes to a crowd whose mercurial temper is painfully, if not laughably, stilted. They roar disapproval run around in confusion, roar approval, fidget and scratch as Antony continues and like well-trained beasts roar again. When Antony whips out Caesar's blood-stained toga, which looks for all the world as it it's been smeared with strawberry ripple ice-cream, the mob gives its practiced gasp, but the audience, instead of being awestruck, chuckles.

Seltzer, in choosing to be as realistic as possible with an opulent production, has risked much. Sometimes the lavish effects work. Jon Warburg's lighting, especially in the storm scene and in the gloom of Brutus's tent on his last night, is imaginative and excellent. But the sound effects are artificial and distracting, the costumes cumbersome and noisy, and the battles athletic but hardly dramatic.

Ultimately, a production must convince the audience that they are watching people not a play. Julius Caesar fails in this respect. The awkward grandioseness of the production continually draws attention away from the dramatic tension between the characters, leaving a Caesar which is long on spectacle but short on life.