Jared Sakren's Southwest Shakespeare Company is establishing itself as the premiere presenter of the Bard's works. Their productions have successfully mixed heart and head, offering audiences both an emotional attachment to and an intellectual understanding of Shakespeare's scripts. With their production of the script that nearly everyone was assigned to read in high school, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Sakren's direction seems to have moved his focus more toward the intellectual side of the work, concentrating on pomp and oration and pulling back slightly on the emotions of the piece. The result is a production that causes one to think more than feel. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but as the body count climbs through this bloody revolt, it leads more to consideration than mourning.
Sakren's direction sometimes borders on brilliant. He and co-set designer Patrick Walsh have reconfigured the Westwood High School auditorium into a stark, raked, and multi-leveled thrust stage that draws the audience into the action in a very literal way. Extensive use of the aisles and even empty seats by the actors forces the audience into the position of participant in the insurrection. Sakren creates many interesting and compelling stage pictures, including an excellent battle scene choreographed by David Barker that is nearly overwhelming. He has demanded of his actors the kind of diction that a Shakespeare play of this magnitude deserves, and nearly every one of them delivers. For me, though, there was a sense more of posturing than feeling as the evening progressed. For all of the beautiful presentations of strong soliloquies and orations, the only emotionally charged performance comes from Christopher Williams' enraged Cassius, and his performance sometimes seems to err on the side of overly angered in comparison to those with whom he performs. Some humanity can be seen in Stafford Clark-Price's mercurial Mark Anthony, especially during his all-important funeral oration, and in Sandy Elias' humorous presentation of Senatorial conspirator Decius. Andi Watson tries to pierce the pervasive cold with Calphurnia's tirade against husband Caesar going to the Senate after her horrific visions. Led by the very measured performance of Ken Love as Brutus, the remainder of the cast seems more reverent than reactionary. In the second act when Love sees Caesar's ghost before his battle against Octavius (a stoic Michael Sherwin) and Anthony, his vibrant emotional response serves to underscore how little feeling and how much thought has gone into Love's presentation of Brutus' serious actions prior. An example of this is Love's interaction with wife Portia (Maren Maclean) in the first act, which is playfully interactive, but lacks the support of each of their separate fears driving her request for complicity. So it is with other players in this impressive think-piece.
The visual elements are eye-popping, as Michael J. Eddy lights Walsh's grand stage from many angles, utilizing a fog machine to give the expanded space three dimensions. Adding to the intellectualizing of the presentation is Richard Jennings' original music, which is used to filmic effect and is stiflingly stuffy. David Temby and Jennifer Shoemaker's sound design does contain flaws, including spotty microphone usage.
The Tragedy of Julius Caesar is a strong historical document of a play, and more likely to be our entrée into Roman events than Plutarch's own writings. It is about one of the most noble, savage, and emotional peoples on Earth, and while this is a very well thought out production, and looks magnificent, it still misses that strong empathetic element that would make Brutus' death at the end of the evening the punctuation Shakespeare intended it to be.
Production Details:
The Tragedy of Julius Caesar
by William Shakespeare
Southwest Shakespeare
Company
The Westwood High School Auditorium, Mesa (For a
map to location, click this
link)
(480) 641-7039
January 17th - February 2nd, 2002
