Et Tu, Dunlop!

By T.E.K.

JULIUS CAESAR by William Shakespeare

Anyone who thinks the theater of the absurd is extinct need only attend the Brooklyn Academy of Music's production of Julius Caesar to behold it rampant on a field of idiocy. Director Frank Dunlop's conception of the play is so aberrant, so devoid of all sense and meaning, that when it does not border on the ludicrous it achieves the inane.

In an evening in which just about everyone abysmally flunks the course, it should be remembered that Dunlop is the teacher who plunged the players into this disaster. His prime error is to reduce the play to some quirky personalities on a bare set; its true home is a realm--the great stage of Rome. Dunlop has given us a Rome sans populace, sans armies, and devoid of the pervasive presence of megalopolitan power--perhaps the most potent character in the drama. The Roman state is what stalks the minds and characters of the men who conspire to kill Caesar. It is never remotely felt here.

Furthermore, Dunlop, who has a nimble intelligence and no inconsiderable gifts in stagecraft, seems either to have missed or ignored the moral point of the play. Rome is at the flash point at which a republic blazes into tyranny. Into the crucible of history, the conspirators, and especially Brutus, pour the proposition that evil means (the assassination of Caesar) justify good ends (the preservation of the citizens' freedom). And history, time and time again, has verified the answer proffered by the play: the ends never justify the means; the means degrade and become the ends.

Mercy should grace any description of the performers, but it is difficult to be charitable while they are stabbing Shakespeare to death. George Rose is comfortable in Caesar's tunic, yet when he dies in the Forum, the event carries no more dramatic gravity than if Robert Morley were to be silenced midway in a British Airways commercial.

Brutus is the moral core of the play, a bit of a standoffish prig, perhaps, but still unstainably idealistic. In Rene Auberjonois's handling he is merely sweatily fretful, like someone who has just received word that he is up for an IRS audit. When it comes to the lean and hungry Cassius, Richard Dreyfuss looks like someone who makes substantial midnight raids on the fridge. More pertinently, he appears as the soul of sanity, a jarringly implausible refutation of the qualities of envy, thwarted ambition and deviousness that are an intrinsic part of Cassius' makeup.

To see the text bereft of all meaning, witness the Marc Antony of Austin Pendleton. He bird-chirps the resonant oratory, and his climactic moments consist of nasal sobs. He could no more move men to mass mutiny than he could leave a scuff mark on a molehill. Alone in this whole sorry mess, Holly Villaire, playing Brutus' wife Portia, rings true, displaying a loving care, loyalty and concern for her husband that no one has shown for the play.

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