"Julius Caesar"
is a complex play with a simple lesson, one Trent Lott has learned by heart this week: whether or not a man accepts responsibility for his actions, he has to accept their consequences. Brutus can minimize his role in the conspiracy, can blame Cassius or Casca or Caesar himself, but the result will still be the same and Brutus will still have to live with it. No matter how much time Brutus spends considering the niceties of stabbing Caesar-"Let's carve him as a dish fit for the gods/Not hew him as a carcase fit for hounds"-Caesar will still be dead, for good or ill.By the same token, a director may refuse to accept responsibility for determining what a play means, but s/he's nonetheless stuck with the results. Or, as countless college graffiti have advised us, "Not to decide is to decide." In the case of director Barbara Gaines, the result of her failure to decide who is right-Cassius, Brutus or Antony-is a production whose meaning is obscure despite the clarity of individual speeches and scenes. Worse: it's a production that's boring. All the interesting choices in the world won't make up for a lack of overall vision.
And there are plenty of interesting individual ideas here-the production is positively teeming with them. Scott Parkinson gives us a sympathetic Cassius, one very probably in love with Brutus. Meanwhile Kevin Gudahl offers a Brutus so engaged in self-congratulation that he refers to himself in the third person and yet so riven with doubt that he can't make a decision-like Claudius and Hamlet in one. If Gaines had gone all the way with these ideas, making Cassius the good guy and Brutus the bad, that would have been fascinating, if not very well-supported by the text. Similarly, had she made Scott Jaeck's Mark Antony a complete groveling fool whose success with the funeral oration is accidental and whose ascension to the throne is the real tragic result of the conspiracy, that would have been something to see.
Instead, we have a sweet Cassius whose behavior is nonetheless appalling. We have a noble Brutus whose wife is nonetheless smarter and more courageous than he by a factor of three. We have an Antony whose swings between idiocy and brilliance, cowardice and bravery, can't even be explained by saying that there's method in his madness. Finally, we have a Caesar (the forgettable Jack Ryland) who seems fair though tough-minded but happens to run a police state. To the extent the production has a political message (other than "Common people are disgusting and stupid and unfit to govern themselves," a perspective revealed in every scene in which they appear), it's that of the holier-than-the-Democrats Left, insisting that because even heroes are flawed there's no difference between them and villains.
The production's devices-modern dress; a sound design heavy on microphone feedback and portentous thumps to punctuate scenes-are ones Chicago Shakespeare has overused and thus made stale. But James Noone's set, with its door slamming down like a guillotine and its corridor evoking the passageways used at political conventions, is quite striking and well-complemented by Kevin Adams's lighting and John Boesche's projections.