I have attached the script as it was originally cut for The Theater At Monmouth production. I won’t go into a long presentation as to why certain cuts were or were not made. Suffice it to say that cuts to Shakespeare are generally made for time and clarity for a 21st century audience used to commercial breaks every 20 minutes. A long television drama is 48 minutes without the breaks. Caesar, played un-cut, would run about 2:15 – 2:30. It’s one of the shorter plays. Our version is set to run at just over 2 hours with intermission.

Caesar a dense play. For those who really know Shakespeare, especially the tragedies, you’ll see that this one, the earliest, has a lot of relationship to later plays and characters. For my money, Portia is an early version of the much more extreme Ophelia. There are many characteristics of the lead characters that, when combined, make a well formed Macbeth or Lear. It’s one of the first times that I’ve taken the time to draw such parallels of Shakespeare’s writings, since I usually take each play as a stand alone piece and don’t compare it much to the others. Scholars dwell on the parallels and use them to make the case the he didn’t write Pericles or whatever. That’s for others to worry about. I don’t give it much thought.

When I was asked to direct Caesar, my first reaction was to curse my friend Bill Van Horn for not being able to direct it. I’m unqualified to direct such a play, and certainly terrified to try to direct it in a laughable schedule of 60 hours, give and take, which is what is available at The Theater At Monmouth. That was January or so. Now it’s June and I’m a week into rehearsals.

I think it’s important to understand a little about our repertory rehearsal schedule. We have an Equity schedule, so there are 7 hours available per day. We split them into two halves and rehearse from 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. with a big break in the middle for lunch. Because I also run the place, I generally work a 9 to 9 day, six days a week, which means that I can still do my work and also rehearsal in a three or four hour chunk a couple times a week. By this point, the end of the second week of the rehearsal period, the company has hit every show. Each actor is playing roles in three of four shows, and all five shows are now at the point where they have had considerable time on their feet and are mostly blocked. Because of special scheduling to accommodate the director of Dangerous Liaisons, Caesar, which has had between 9 and 12 hours of rehearsal to this point, has rehearsed the least so far. We’ll catch up.

Unlike the other directors, I have the luxury of having watched five seasons of rehearsals before having to direct. My biggest goal for TAM since I’ve been here is to create a place where great theater can be born. I think we have a creatively charged atmosphere, as strong a company as we’ve had in many years, and a base of experience that helps prevent efforts to reinvent the wheel. So in 2003, we’re poised for some great work. But when I had to start thinking as a director, I was struck by the amount of time spent in the past seasons on blocking, and fixing blocking, and getting people where they need to be. Time lost from what I feel makes a show great – human interaction and connection of characters. I had just directed We Won’t pay, We Won’t Pay! in the spring. It was a pretty technical show in terms of blocking, with plenty of physical work, site gags, etc. I decided that for Caesar, I’d focus on the emotion of the characters and see if I could let the play block itself for the most part. In other words, I decided that I could trust myself to know when the blocking was working and believe that I could regulate the flow of the blocking (meaning not having all the scenes played in the same spot on the stage) on the fly, and really put the focus on the acting, the emotion, and what is at stake for these characters. I was led to this idea by the fact that there is a bold murder (of Caesar), a rather remarkable moment of self-mutilation (by Portia), the brutal ripping apart of a man by a crowd (Cinna the Poet’s death), and three suicides (Portia, Cassius, Brutus), in addition to some other deaths along the way. The emotional height of these characters must be extremely high, I reasoned. And so I decided to start there.

After an excellent reading of the play by this great group of about 18 actors that I had to work with, we started into the smaller scenes. I actually started with what I feel is the first key scene of the play, the early Brutus and Cassius scene. From there, I’ve spent two and a half rehearsals (the first half of the first one for the reading) just working out the smaller scenes, setting them and mostly badgering the actors into really thinking about what’s at stake with their thoughts and actions. I want this to be a tense play, a play that is hard to take your eyes off of. (If it works, it’ll be a great way for people to see Caesar.) So far, I like what I’m seeing. This morning (this is being written very early on Saturday, June 21) I’ll be blocking the first crowd scenes. Now that most everyone knows how their characters feel about everything that’s going on, I think the crowd scenes, especially the murder of Caesar will be easy to block.

That’s not to say blocking isn’t important. The group scenes need to be visually compelling, and I have chosen several specific moments to be visual: Caesar’s stabbing, Cinna the Poet’s death, the ghosts and the interesting scene leading up to it, and Brutus’ death. Thanks to John Story’s great set design and Gail Russell’s compelling costume plot, we can also make some stellar stage pictures throughout. But at the center of it all is the story of Brutus struggling against his foes and his personal demons. I think it’s safe to say at this point that we’ve gotten a great start on this plan and it’s working so far. (knock wood.)

Finally, for this installment, I need to say a word about place, time, period, etc. What we knew from the beginning was that we didn’t want a toga Caesar, a fascist military Caesar, or some kind of modern dress, big business, Caesar. When we started with the actors, I told them it was a more modern play with classic influences and asked that they focus on the action of the scenes rather than worrying about the time period so much. That worked for a brief time, but by the second rehearsal someone said “if I have to write something down do I use a bic pen?” My immediate answer was no, but the question was clear. “What’s here? What’s around us? What are my shoes like?,” etc. At the top of the third rehearsal I told them some more. John’s set is kind of timeless, but certainly Romanesque with two marble columns and some stone blocks used for chairs and such. But the stage is almost bare and has few trappings that actors tend to latch on to to establish place. Gail’s costumes (which were only a discussion until yesterday when she faxed some drawings to me from California) are more classical than modern. They are 12th century or Byzantine with some modern influences, such as black pants. They are layered with capes and hoods and things. From the drawings I see several very interesting looks and it’s exciting.

Most of all, Gail’s costumes and Ron Madonia’s lights will support the earliest ideas I had about the play which is that it goes slowly from black and white to red (blood) and no one is left clean at the end. The costumes have quite a bit of red underneath or inside, and the actors slowly reveal these elements as the play continues.

So when it comes to the question of place, the answer is: an earlier, more primitive time, but one that has some very clear connections to today. It’s exactly what I hope the audience understands from the show.