Since my return from Japan, there have been several soirees and treks of note. As April gave way to May, Will and I took the train to New York to join Joe and see the BAM production of Julius Caesar.
(http://www.bam.org/theater/2013/julius-caesar)
View from our train window
What can one say about AMTRAK? It was an adventure, an ordeal, and an experience. We dined in the Dining Car to over-priced food and we had scotch in the club car. It was almost impossible to sleep, huddled against each other in coach with the overhead lights in our eyes and our heads struggling with blankets and alternating from his shoulder to mine. We emerged from the train into Penn Station and walked out onto the dazzling streets of Manhattan at mid-day, headed to Times Square, and then the A-Train to Brooklyn where Joe met us in the Marriott Hotel. Ads for Julius Caesar filled the subway car.
From that point on we filled the next three days with theater, art, Greenwich Village, a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, Sunday in Central Park, Seeing Gertrude Stein (in the Metropolitan Museum), and Will's singing upstairs at the Stonewall Bar. Meals with Joe and friends, Julius Caesar, and taking photos of all the Cherry trees in full bloom around Washington Square and in Brooklyn.
Will takes in the view
On our last day in Brooklyn, Joe brought us NY Bagels, cream cheese, and other delicious b'fast fare. Then we made our way by subway to Penn Sta. where Will entertained with song and guitar (so near Madison Sq. Garden) until we boarded the train home. Will's performance continued 'til midnight in the club car...
Will on guitar playing for a Whovian.
More photos: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10200276119520433.1073741832.1076735274&type=3
Shortly after the trek to New York, our friends Wolfgang and Donald arrived from Frankfurt and it was three days dining out in Atlanta followed by another trip to Asheville, NC with lunch at the Dillard House and a visit to Graveyard Falls on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
After Asheville came Lookout Mountain and a spectacular June Wedding. No expense was spared for the marriage of Katie and Oliver...
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10200477982086871.1073741833.1076735274&type=3
Starr and I had a good time attending the dinners, champagne breakfasts, reception, and enjoying the ever-changing, cool early summer weather on Starr's Porch and new deck.
By way of review, here is the New Yorker's Review of Julius Caesar as performed in New York...
APRIL 22, 2013
AN AFRICAN CAESAR
When “Julius Caesar” was performed at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York in 1864, the role of Mark Antony was played by John Wilkes Booth. His brother Edwin Booth played Brutus, and their brother Junius Brutus Booth, Jr., was Cassius. Five months later, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln with the cry “sic semper tyrannis” (“thus always to tyrants,” words traditionally attributed to Brutus at Caesar’s assassination). In the years following, Edwin Booth went on to one of the most distinguished theatrical careers of the nineteenth century. Between December, 1871, and March, 1872, he appeared in another run of “Julius Caesar” in New York City, playing, on different nights, Mark Antony, Brutus, and Cassius.
I saw “Julius Caesar” recently in a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It happened to be on April 13th, the Ides of April, and a day before the anniversary of Lincoln’s death. The coincidence was theatrical in a literal sense, too: Lincoln died in Ford’s Theatre in Washington, Caesar died in Pompey’s Theatre in Rome, “Julius Caesar” was premièred at the Globe Theatre in London, and I watched it at the Harvey Theatre, in Brooklyn (where the play continues until April 28th). Too much can be made of this sort of thing, but Shakespeare’s love of superstition is rich soil for suggestible minds.
“Julius Caesar” bristles with augury, but hinges on a more terrestrial concern: Was Caesar a tyrant and thus deserving of tyrannicide? The Caesar of the play is imperious and inflexible, happy to compare himself to Mount Olympus and the North Star. But he also has “popularity” in the sixteenth-century sense of that word, as the scholar James Shapiro has written: his rule is a radical democracy that is the very opposite of tyranny. He might have escaped assassination had he read the note proffered him by Artemidorus as he entered the Senate on the Ides of March. That he waved it off with the self-promoting and self-abnegating line “What touches us ourself shall be last serv’d” is evidence of his popularity.
This finely balanced ambiguity is the material for the first half of the play; it is no surprise that Shakespeare’s coinage “misgiving” should make its first appearance in English in this play of doubts. A tight conspiratorial knot leads up to the assassination, which is followed by the funeral orations by Brutus and Mark Antony. Shakespeare then takes us into the less interesting matter of the conspirators’ fates, their various suicides and deaths by misadventure. The R.S.C. players do their best with this later material, though they are hampered somewhat by a minimalist staging in which we get neither the sense of battle nor the tension of a battle camp.
The R.S.C. production has an all-black cast, and is directed by Gregory Doran. It is an African “Julius Caesar,” and the play contains many elements that aid this conceit: the soothsayer is aféticheur in body paint, Brutus has a silly houseboy, there’s a lynching (of a poet who happens to share a name with one of the conspirators). The assassination of Caesar himself feels like a story from one of the newly independent African countries of the nineteen-sixties. Doran highlights the political aspect of the play, and this is to the good, for it is still necessary to insist on Africa as a site of political and ideological contest, and not a static place mired in an unchanging anthropological past. Caesar, played with roguish charm and cold resolve by Jeffery Kissoon, is in the company of such manipulative despots as Idi Amin Dada, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida.
The alterations in the text are limited to a few compressions here and there, and to the occasional well-placed “ehen!” (one of the most frequent interjections in West African English, generally used as an affirmative, sometimes as a query). The most familiar lines—“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves,” “Cowards die many times before their deaths,” “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones”—are delivered as smoothly as proverbs. A small musical ensemble is on the stage in some scenes, playing highlife and Manding-influenced music, which adds a beautiful aural texture to the proceedings. Before going, I had thought that a more precise identification of the play with a particular country—South Africa, say, or Nigeria—would be preferable, the better to avoid the pernicious notion that Africa is a country. But the performance persuaded me otherwise: Shakespeare’s play is a gloss on an English translation of Plutarch’s “Lives,” and its force is in the dramatic language. The general African setting unexpectedly illuminates that language. Had the setting been too narrow, it would have distracted the viewer from the delicate amalgam at hand: an ancient Rome in which Renaissance English is spoken by contemporary Africans.
The ensemble is extraordinary. Cyril Nri’s Cassius and Joseph Mydell’s Casca have such clear diction that I found myself wishing for more of Shakespeare’s plays to be done in African-accented English. Kissoon’s Caesar, Paterson Joseph’s Brutus, and Ray Fearon’s Mark Antony are less clear, their use of accents drifting at times into singsong. But their acting is tense and vibrant, and they command the stage. All have the broad shoulders, swagger, and calculated carelessness of African “big men.” One of the pleasures on offer here is the sight of these men strolling about, all coiled energy and purpose, in their dyed buba and sokoto, or in the white or earth-toned safari suits one sees on businessmen in Lagos, Dakar, or Kinshasa. Walking with authority is an art of which the leads in this “Julius Caesar” are virtuosi.
Shakespeare’s rhetorical choices in “Julius Caesar” were intended to echo Roman public speech. He aimed, as W. H. Auden noted in his “Lectures on Shakespeare,” for a bleak, plainspoken style largely dependent on monosyllabic words. There’s an added benefit to this: words written then sound much like they might now. Brutus, taking leave of Cassius in the first act, in the infancy of the conspiracy, says:
For this time I will leave you.
To-morrow, if you please to speak to me,
I will come home to you; or if you will,
Come home to me, and I will wait for you.
Mark Antony, manipulating the crowd during his “friends, Romans, countrymen” oration, is similarly straightforward. His reiteration of the word “honorable” emphasizes its unwieldy shape and ironic intent in what is otherwise a staccato pentameter:
Good friends, sweet friends, let me not stir you up
To such a sudden flood of mutiny.
They that have done this deed are honorable.
What private griefs they have, alas, I know not,
That made them do it. They are wise and honorable,
And will, no doubt, with reason answer you.
Later, Antony, in his arrogant way, tells Octavius “I have seen more days than you”; later still, at the Battle of Philippi, he attempts to pull rank.
ANTONY: Octavius, lead your battle softly on
Upon the left hand of the even field.
OCTAVIUS: Upon the right hand I. Keep thou the left.
ANTONY: Why do you cross me in this exigent?
OCTAVIUS: I do not cross you; but I will do so.
It is an ominous bit of foreshadowing, and the lines are delivered well. But I missed a certain intensity that might have made this young Octavius (Ivanno Jeremiah) more convincing. This, after all, is the man who will transform himself into the Emperor Augustus and will rule the world, and it is to him that Shakespeare gives the very last words of the play. I wished to see more evidence of that potential, in this play that is so much about how a fate guessed at today can become a reality tomorrow.
In the spring or winter of 1865, sometime between the Booth brothers’ “Julius Caesar” performance and Abraham Lincoln’s death, Lincoln had a nightmare. He recounted it to his friend Ward Hill Lamon, who wrote it down. Lincoln had seen in his nightmare a mournful crowd in front of the White House, and on asking who had died, had been told it was the President, “killed by an assassin.” The dream “annoyed” him for quite a while after, and then, presumably, he let the matter be. As in Shakespeare’s play and Caesar’s life, the portent proved exact.
Teju Cole is a photographer and writer. His novel “Open City” was published last year. He contributes frequently to Page-Turner.
Photograph by Richard Termine.
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