Tuesday Night in Fort Greene: Curious Frog Theatre Company presents "Julius Caesar" in Fort Greene Park

Tonight we were in the leafy expanse of Fort Greene Park to see an engrossing, thoughtful production of Julius Caesar -- with the most incredibly intense fight scenes we've seen in a long time -- by the Curious Frog Theatre Company, whose work we've admired for years.

We've written before about how Julius Caesar has been one of our favorite Shakespeare plays since we first read it more than 46 years ago -- we know a lot of the play by heart -- and we never get tired of seeing productions, even though we've seen several just in the past couple of years.

It was a gorgeous night, and the performance took place on the hilly meadow by the north side of Fort Greene Park, near Myrtle Avenue, surrounded by the huge trees.

The 149-foot granite Doric column over the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument crypt served as a wonderfully apt backdrop to this play of intrigue set in ancient Rome.

The play also resonated with us seeing it on the day rebels overwhelmed Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s compound in Tripoli, with no one sure what the outcome will be of this strike against a charismatic tyrant whose supporters in Tripoli remain angrily defiant.

Yeah, Julius Caesar is definitely still relevant, and the Curious Frog production made that evident. Director Robert J. Dyckman moves things along efficiently, if not bloodlessly. But the full passions, apart from the scenes with the worried Roman wives Portia (Kimberley Wong)

and Calpurnia (Angela Sharp) -- the only female characters, although this production's ethnically diverse cast of seven men and seven women all play roles without regard to gender, which works so well it seems unremarkable -- don't really start to appear until after the assassination.

Then the momentum of the drama, and the passions of the street mobs and the individual leaders, move things with an irresistible momentum to the spectacular long and violent fight scenes (kudos to fight director Rocio Mendez) -- with both men and women going at it with a ferocity that's actually scary -- and the final military battles and the deaths of the major conspirators.

Set in the traditional 44 B.C.E. with Roman garb, the play nevertheless seems timeless. (To us, this play's traditional costumes somehow always come off as more contemporary than Shakespeare played in Elizabethan costumes.)

James Ware is a strong Julius Caesar, perhaps rasher and more in command than others we've seen (in the classic film version, Louis Calhern plays him as a kind of doddering old leader), and Nicholas Urda as Brutus conveys intelligence and wariness.

That wariness is especially directed at Cassius, played here by Reneé Rodriguez (director of some of the previous Curious Frog productions we've enjoyed) with an almost sneering skepticism about everything except her own ideas. Director Robert J. Dyckman delivers an effective funeral oration as Mark Antony, though at times Antony's cynicism is only slightly less hidden than Cassius'.

As seems customary with the productions of Julius Caesar we've seen onstage, most of the cast takes on multiple roles, with nearly all the actors except the major characters being members of the mobs of commoners and crowds of Roman citizens as well as the fierce soldiers in battle in the Acts IV and V scenes.

They included Emilio Aquino as Decius Brutus and an assured Octavius); Angela Sharp (Calpurnia/Popilius/Messala​/2nd Commoner); Krystine Summers in the roles of stolid characters like Casca, Lepidus, and Strato as well as a Commoner-Musician
Kimberley Wong (Portia/Soothsayer/Pindarus​/Citizen 2) and Manuel de la Portilla, who's all over the place and seems to be more than one person playing Marullus, Brutus' boy servant Lucius, Caesar’s servant, the senators Cicero and Publius, the soldier Cato and a citizen -- whew!).

Additional excellent cast members, performing with equal energy, were Al Patrick Jo, who made a very good Metellus Cimber as well as Lucillius and Citizen 3); D. Ajane Carlton (Flavius/Artemidorus/Soldie​r 2/Citizen 4); Shae Orrick, playing Trebonius and Volumnius; Holly Dortch as Cinna and Titinius; and Kevin Russo (Caius Ligarius/Octavius’ Servant/Soldier 1).

We were impressed by the minimalist set, which worked fine in this setting, and since Curious Frog Theatre Company is taking this Julius Caesar, as well as Two Gentlemen of Verona, to a dozen parks and other venues in four boroughs, it's obviously necessary.

As darkness descended over Fort Greene Park and this excellent production ended, after depositing our usual donation into, here, a Roman warrior's shield, we walked along to through the park, thinking about, among the many lines we've learned by heart since ninth grade, these, immediately after Caesar's assassination: "How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over, / In states unborn and accents yet unknown!" And when we got home, we looked to the New York Times website to see the news from Tripoli.

We're grateful we got to see the Curious Frog Theatre Company do their thing tonight. If you can attend one of the eleven remaining performances of their 2011 summer season, you'll probably be grateful, too.

Saturday Afternoon in Prospect Park: EBE Ensemble presents "Julius Caesar" at Shakespeare in the Pagoda

Early this afternoon we were in Central Park for the 1 p.m. show in this season's new Shakespeare in the Pagoda series at (of course) the Music Pagoda.

The EBE Ensemble presented a taut and thoughtful version of Julius Caesar with a terrific cast under the direction of Kristine Ayers.

The costumes were contemporary/casual, casting was somewhat gender-neutral, and the production made effective use of the setting, which is really quite good for classic theater, as last year's production of Henry IV and Henry V by the Rebellious Subjects company proved.

From our previous experience at the Music Pagoda, we knew enough to bring a little blanket (or a chair, for those not schlepping on two trains from as far away as Williamsburg) because the ground is mostly black dirt.

But it's very comfortable and cozy, and off the beaten track enough so that there aren't many of the distractions that outdoor theater is prey to. (The biggest one today came late in the play when a girl about six ran ahead of his father up the pagoda's steps to play, unaware that she was briefly in the middle of a stage production.)

Early on, a few actors were egging on the crowd to cheer for Caesar. We at first thought they were doing warm-up exercised but as they were shooed away in the play's opening lines by a Roman official, it was clear that they represented the frenzy of the mob that makes Julius Caesar so frightening as a political document.

The way the crowd is whipped up into a frenzy, first against Caesar and in favor of Brutus, Cassius and their fellow conspirators, and then, turning on a dime after Mark Antony's clever (and passionately controlled) sophistry at the fallen leader's funeral, they run to attack the conspirators, is one of this production's triumphs.

The actors use the audience and setting effectively, but the most chilling scene is the mob tearing to pieces the poet Cinna because he's unlucky enough to have the same name as one of the conspirators who kill Caesar. (He's the Roman Shirley Sherrod, with the crowd the Tea Party high on Fox News, without benefit of the complete videotape.)

With the exception of the small roles of Portia and Calpurnia, the wives of Brutus and Caesar, in scenes expressing their fears on the morning of the Ides of March, Julius Caesar is nominally entirely male, but we loved the gender-neutral casting of the title role (and a few others) here. Camille Mazurek has the gravitas and charismatic bearing of the great Julius, and giving the role of Calpurnia to Montgomery Sutton, who plays it as an intelligent but unheeded spouse treated mostly as a boy toy, was really a wonderful touch.

Julius Caesar is probably the Shakespeare play whose text we know best. Back in the spring of 1965, Mrs. Sanjour at Meyer Levin Junior High School 285 in East Flatbush made class 9SPE2 each get up and recite a lengthy monologue (we picked the one by Brutus that opens Act II) and recall its lines and others.

That was old-fashioned teaching, but Mrs. Sanjour also took us on a bus trip one day to Greenwich Village, where we watched the 1953 star-filled film version at a revival showing at a West 8th Street movie house, either the Eighth Street Playhouse or the Art. (Our teacher told us to spot anachronisms, and there's not only the tolling of the clock in ancient Rome - Shakespeare's doing - but at one point Brutus is seen leafing through a page-filled hardcover book rather than a scroll.)

We last taught Julius Caesar in the summer of 2006 at the School of Visual Arts. It seemed freshly relevant in light of the Iraq war. The play deals with issues of leadership and conscience, of political ambition and idealism and how they get mixed up. Brutus is the play's fulcrum and his death at the drama's end, mourned by his enemy and vanquisher Mark Antony as "the noblest Roman of them all," is both inevitable and deeply disturbing. Today's production at the Music Pagoda brought out Julius Caesar in all its facets as both human and political tragedy.

The troupe made good use of the audience, bringing some of us up to circle Caesar's body at his funeral, where Mark Antony wept over our assassinated leader, showed his bloody garment, and told us of Caesar's generous bequeaths to us, the people of Rome.

The show, sponsored in part by Green Mountain Energy (which had a table today) and Arizona Iced Tea, featured among the cast directed by Kristine Ayers (along with the alternating Romeo and Juliet, directed by Dev Bondarin) many familiar faces to Prospect Park area residents, including ensemble members like the magnetic Montgomery Sutton (Rebellious Subjects’ Henry IV/V at the Music Pagoda; Gallery Players’ King Lear and Candide) as a callow and impetuous Octavius Caesar and in a sweet turn as a worried Calpurnia;

a bearded Eric Alba (EBE’s Buddha Nosh and Russian Roulette) portrayed a complex and conflicted Brutus, a good man, well-meaning but easily swayed and ultimately too naive to be an effective leader;

and Joshua Luria (Rebellious Subjects’ Henry IV/V) as Casca, who's plain-spoken but in the end not too dumb to comprehend the implications of the conspirators' actions.

The play also featured guest artists Camille Mazurek (Pulse Ensemble Theater’s Twelfth Night and Ladies in Retirement) doing a magnificent job in the title role, creating a portrait good enough to do what the best of actors playing Caesar do, which is to dominate the play's action even after the assassination (she also appears at the end as Strato, the friend who assists Brutus's suicide);

Nick Reinhardt(Rebellious Subjects’ Henry IV/V) as Mark Antony, by turns cynical, oleaginous, inflammatory and masterful;

Len Rella (Gallery Players’ Candide;Gorilla Rep’s Julius Caesar and Joan of Arc), playing the wily Cassius looking very lean and hungry and also petty, sneaky, easily offended - but not so much a manipulator that he doesn't feel pain and sympathy at others' distress;

Ugo Chukwu (The Heights’ Players Take Me Out) as stolid Messala, and effectively as Flavius and other players in the Roman streets.
Jessica Rothenberg (The Huntington Theatre’s The Cherry Orchard; Gallery Players’ King Lear) does effective triple duty as a hapless Lepidus, Artemidorus the failed informer, and most brilliantly in her brief turn as Portia, showing womanly steel despite her frail condition (there's a suggestion that Portia has suffered a stroke).

Elizabeth Spano (whom we saw last year in Curious Frog’s Romeo & Juliet) on the other side of Prospect Park) and who reprises that role in the Pagoda this summer) is the soothsayer ("Beware the Ides of March") and Brutus's protective servant Lucius; and Jessica Frey (Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s Much Ado About Nothing, Pericles) plays Cinna and some really riled-up Romans.

The play's costume design was by Amanda Jenks, with original music by Nicholas R. Wright, fight choreography by Turner Smith, and live foley design by Joshua B. Jenks and Nancy Valladares. On Julius Caesar, director Kristine Ayers was joined by assistant director and stage manager Mandee Kulaga.

According to the promo material,

EBE Ensemble is dedicated to developing and presenting new and unique works of theatre. They believe that making theater accessible enhances a community and that, through an ensemble-based approach, they can better present quality theatre that strives for an emotional truth. Now finishing their third season, EBE Ensemble has produced several new plays and adaptations and created the “You Fill in the Blank” play festival and competition in addition to the award-winning national one-act festival, Elephants on Parade.

For us, Julius Caesar at the Music Pagoda proved a fast-moving, exciting, and powerful production of Shakespeare's most readable play, a political thriller with ominous overtones for today.