A Defense Of Orange Julius
I saw Shakespeare in the Park’s Julius Caesar and the outrage is both utterly ludicrous and completely predictable.
I was lucky enough to get a ticket to Friday’s Shakespeare in the Park performance of Julius Caesar. I hadn’t actually read anything about it, so I was amused when the contemporarily styled drama opened with Caesar (played by the ubiquitous Gregg Henry) hamming it up for the crowd while dressed like Donald Trump (long-tie included) and swaggering with Trump-esque finger points.
My first thought was that this was a huge risk — artistically and otherwise. Contemporary stagings of Shakespeare are nothing new or risky in and of themselves, but visually styling the plot and characters of the tragedy after Trump, his menagerie of grotesques, and the #RESIST movement could have quickly turned hokey and made a comedy out of a largely serious drama.
But, for the most part, it worked. Forget all the culture-wars clamor of the last few days. It was a well acted and well staged production of a great play. Henry, while leaning on his Trumpian touches, is still very much Shakespeare’s Caesar. (The play’s current detractors likely haven’t seen it themselves, so this point has thus far been lost on them.) Octavius is amusingly styled after Jared Kushner (blue blazer, aviators, and flak jacket included) and Calpurnia speaks with a Slavic accent, yes, but the characters are sufficiently individuated that it doesn’t turn into a satire or spoof. The standout performance belongs to Elizabeth Marvel, who does a superb job as Mark Antony; she’s full of rage and pathos as well as some humor.
Oh, and there are real helicopters! (That or the helicopters I saw flying overhead accidentally had eerily good timing.)
But this isn’t a theater review, so I’ll just say that if you get a chance to check it out, you should. (Bonus: House of Cards fans get not only Marvel but Corey Stoll as Brutus.)
The other risk was a cultural one: seeing a character styled visually after Trump means you’ll see someone who looks like Trump getting knifed to death on the floor of the Senate. My first thought upon seeing Henry’s Caesar was, “This is going to blow up into a scandal on right-wing news.”
It wouldn’t matter that the character very much isn’t Trump or that the assassination is in no way glorified or justified as wise. You’d have to be there to know that — or have read the play, at least. And our American cable media — particularly our right-wing media — aren’t exactly known for their sense of context or critical nuance, much less for their talking heads’ knowledge of the literary canon. (Which itself is funny, because for all the talk of defending the West from the scourge of immigrants and multiculturalism, self-appointed defenders of civilization and culture often have no clue what comprises their own civilization or culture.)
Basically, sure as shit, someone was going to record the play on their phone, upload it, and the internet rage machine would do what it always does — conservative, liberal, or otherwise. The only real surprise was that it took until Sunday for the anger spiral to begin, when it was announced Delta and Bank of America pulled their sponsorship of the play, with Delta pulling out of The Public Theater partnership altogether.
The outrage is ludicrous. That said, it is wholly expected. And I imagine the play’s producers expected it.
For all the talk about free speech and snowflakes and emasculated cucks and campus safe spaces and a world where the liberal thought police have everyone walking on eggshells, conservatives haven’t shown that their skin is any thicker than liberals’ or that they really support free speech when they’re its target. One might even argue that they are quicker to take offense — especially when you consider that, unlike CNN or MSNBC, Fox News by its own architect’s admission was and is designed simply to tap into its viewers’ easily aggravated sense of indignation.
Breitbart and others farther to the right have only doubled down on these feelings of offense. Whether it’s the War on Christmas or monuments to Confederates or the recent kerfuffle over Kathy Griffin, popular right-wing discourse is fueled by hurt feelings and shocked sensibilities.
Given this double standard, it’s not surprising we haven’t heard the right’s free speech advocates denouncing Delta or BoA as they have when organizations pulled support for luminaries like Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, Hank Williams, Jr., or Ted Nugent. Instead, Julius Caesar has received admonishment from the usual suspects at Fox News, Breitbart, The Daily Caller, et al, as well as a fair amount of Twitter condemnation.
It’s certainly fair to dislike the play or its suggestion of similarities between Caesar and Trump. Everyone is entitled to an aesthetic opinion. After all, the staging was obviously meant to provoke a response and make people think about the play and current events in a new and shocking context. It’s not going to be for everybody.
It is quite another thing, however, to demonize the play’s sponsors (e.g. The New York Times Corporation) or suggest that artists receiving any public funding can’t infuse politics in their work — if in fact it’s even possible to make art that isn’t in some way political. (Though that’s a whole other discussion for another time.) If you say you’re all about free speech, it’s highly hypocritical then to go and complain that people shouldn’t be able to put on a play because you don’t like what they say. And certainly, in America, the president isn’t immune from people’s ire. At least it wasn’t when the president was Barack Obama. (If you think our leadership should be, however, you might find our ally Saudi Arabia more to your liking.)
At any rate, if public money couldn’t fund political speech, there wouldn’t be a church left with tax-exempt status.
Crybaby hypocrisies aside, the outrage is also just a very bad misreading of the assassination scene, the play as a whole, and the history of the Roman civil wars in the 40s BC.
For better or worse, Shakespeare’s play has shaped popular, modern perception of figures like Caesar and Brutus. In the play, Caesar is an ambitious tyrant with an inflated sense of his own greatness. With some slight reservations, he wants to be crowned emperor. Brutus, on the other hand, believes in the Republic. And despite loving Caesar personally, he makes the sacrifice of aiding and joining in the assassination of Caesar to save liberty. And because it’s a tragedy, he makes avoidable mistakes that cost him down the line, such as not also murdering Mark Antony, who unites with Octavius to defeat the liberator Brutus and establish the Empire.
The Caesar and Trump comparisons aren’t unfounded. After all, Caesar in the play is a populist of sorts and at odds with a legislative elite. And while Caesar, much like Trump, is shown to be an overreaching tyrant, the play doesn’t defend the assassination. Instead, it warns that you might get something worse — which is exactly what happens. If overreaching ambition is a foible, Brutus possesses it too in his belief that he can reshape the Roman world and the emotions of the mob. In this vein, the play also warns of the dangers of relying on easily swayed public opinion. As easily as you can win them to your side, as Brutus does after killing Caesar, you can just as easily lose them, as happens when Antony sways them to vengeance and retaliation.
Further complicating the reading of the assassination is that Brutus is portrayed as the only true republican in the assassination, because as Antony points out while hunched over Brutus’s corpse, the other assassins were driven by jealousy rather than a desire for liberty. In other words, they were just haters and losers.
Shakespeare's play is highly inaccurate in its portrayals of Caesar and Brutus in particular. To this day, people look at Brutus and his co-conspirators as admirable martyrs for freedom. This isn’t exactly the truth.
While the Roman Republic was certainly not an autocracy, Caesar was by no means its first authoritarian dictator (e.g. Sulla). Rome had also been through unrest and civil wars for some time before Caesar —and these fights often saw the Senate and the people at odds with each other. In other words, to oversimplify a bit, the Senate was not in place to protect the will of the people; it was in place to protect the interests of the class of people who could hope to become senators — which they saw as in the best interests of the state. It was often contemptuous of the people, the senate being composed of a small population of elites with their own designs on wealth and power. In that light, Brutus and company didn’t murder Caesar in order to restore power to a republican democracy the way we might like to think; they murdered him to restore power to themselves. (The struggle between autocrats and plutocrats both claiming to fight for freedom and the people is a frequently recurring motif in Western history.)
The assassination of Caesar then, whether you interpret it from the vantage-point of history or literature, is not glorified. It mired Rome in more war and resulted in an actual emperor, not just someone with ambitions to be one.
But these nuances don’t make for exciting newscopy or hot takes, so what people instead saw on Fox and Friends this weekend was a grainy loop of Caesar/Trump being dragged off a podium and stabbed by an assortment of women and brown people — undoubtedly a conscious directorial choice and a blunt-force one at that, but still one that has artistic and dramatic context. Context, however, is worthless currency on Fox and Friends and Twitter and anywhere else offense and outrage are the gold standard — right or left.
And anyhow, what isn’t getting talked about is when Caesar gets out of his gold tub, you can see Gregg Henry’s coin purse. I can assure you: it is much more shocking than the assassination scene.
Dane A. Wisher is based in Brooklyn.
