Arc of Anguish

By T.E. Kalem

JULIUS CAESAR

by William Shakespeare

How many ages hence

Shall this our lofty scene be acted

over

In states unborn and accents yet

unknown!

--Julius Caesar

Sage and seer though he was, Shakespeare could not have guessed at the prophetic accuracy of his own lines or have foreseen that in 1979 they would be spoken in the accents of Manhattan's black and Spanish Harlem. As always, genius defies augury.

With the audacity of the venturesome, Joseph Papp has assembled a black-Hispanic acting troupe, and its debut production is Julius Caesar. In the U.S. the problem of proper delivery of the Shakespearean line transcends ethnic background or race. Few, if any, American actors are qualified to speak in iambic pentameter. Lacking sufficient breath control, they pant when they should roar, and jangle the music and authority of poetic rhetoric.

Fortunately, Shakespeare's plays are fueled by more than a consummate mastery of the English tongue. They search out what Hamlet called "the motive and the cue for passion" and release characters like comets blazing across four centuries without extinction. In the universality of its human concerns and its storytelling entrancement, any of Shakespeare's front-rank plays redeems the flaws of the players.

That is what happens in the current instance. Despite its title, Julius Caesar is Brutus' play. It is the tragedy of a philosopher-saint. From the beginning, he is morally wary of Cassius' insinuative efforts to draw him into a conspiracy against Caesar. Yet his love for Rome renders him vulnerable. He asks Cassius to speak openly:

What is it that you would impart

to me?

If it be aught toward the general

good,

Set honour in one eye and death i'

th' other,

And I will look on both

indifferently;

For let the gods so speed me as I

love

The name of honour more than I

fear death.

His is an idealistic conscience launched on the treacherous pragmatic seas of political action. His spirit travels in an arc of anguish from the moment he plunges his sword into the Roman tyrant to receive the heart-rending rebuke "Et tu, Brute?-- Then fall Caesar!" to the moment he runs on the selfsame sword.

Goodness is all in this role, and Roscoe Orman conveys it with naked honesty, especially in a touching scene with his loyal wife Portia (Mary Alice). Gylan Kain's Cassius is less convincing. He possesses the character's guile and envy but not his menace. Morgan Freeman, an actor of intrepid gifts, would have suited the part better, and is somewhat wasted as Casca. While firm in his authority, Sonny Jim Games' Caesar is smugly arrogant rather than imperiously regal.

The most powerful presence on the stage is that of Jaime Sanchez. His Marc Antony is a Latinate fire storm who could sear stones, let alone move plebeians. His funeral oration turns the hearers into a combustible evangelical orgy, and deserves to do so.

-- T.E.Kalem

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