Playwright: William Shakespeare, At: Easy Street Players at the Athenaeum, Phone: 773-935-6860; $15, Runs through: Sept. 22
Easy Street Players' most recent productions have been camp comedies such as Sordid Lives and Debbie Does Dallas, so I expected Julia Caesar to be a camp, drag, genderfuck version of Shakespeare's sometimes-clichéd Roman history classic. Not at all. Instead, Easy Street offers an earnest and serious reading of Julius Caesar in which many roles both large and small are gender-reversed. Julius Caesar, Marc Antony, Cassius and most of the conspirators are played by women, and they are played AS women with pronouns changed accordingly. On the other hand, Calpurnia is played by a man, so for once Caesar's wife is not above suspicion. But Brutus—the play's central figure and tragic hero—still is played by a man.
Given the mixed signals of casting—neither all men nor all women nor all roles reversed—it's difficult to say exactly why Easy Street took this not-very-easy path. Chicspeare, Babes With Blades and others have done the sex-reversal thing, so the chief motivation now seems to be the exercise of it; to offer women the opportunity to traverse one of Shakespeare's many male-dominant plays. But why, then, keep Brutus a man?
Unquestionably, a male Brutus and a female Cassius gives their scenes together—the play's emotional core—an unexpected sexual dynamic. 'You know I do fawn on men and hug them well,' Cassius tells Brutus early on, while their Act IV battlefield scene is an intense and passionate lover's quarrel. It's interesting as a literary and acting exercise, but I don't think it illuminated the play and its themes in fresh ways.
As for execution, Easy Street clearly is over-reaching itself in this effort, served by an energetic but young director and a large cast with mixed skill in classical repertory. Heather Boas as Cassius and Matt Dyson as Brutus are the best of the company, and carry much of the show with intelligent line readings. Stacey Jowett as Marc Antony lacks subtlety and emotional range, especially as directed by Zach Angel who doesn't yet understand that anger and revenge, even in Shakespeare, need not be shouted. She is not alone in falling too often into rant and declamation. No one is credited for the fight choreography ( swords, daggers, quarterstaffs ) which holds its own.
The physical production is quite basic, with the costumes—created by the same Stacey Jowett—as the chief visual element. Displaying a great deal of male and female skin, the togs and togas in a narrow silver-gray-black-brown color palette show some imagination in a Deco-Moderne way that remind me of Star Trek encounters with pseudo-classical civilizations.
Julia Caesar is not Shakespeare by flashes of lightning. Chalk it up to Easy Street's learning curve. But, like Caesar him/herself, credit Easy Street for being ambitious.