Julius Caesar
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textWiliam Shakespeare
direted by
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CastJim True-Frost (Marcus Brutus) Sara Kathryn Bakker (Portia/Calpurnia) Jared Craig (Lucius, the boy) Thomas Derrah (Julius Caesar) Mark L. Montgomery (Cassius) Remo Airaldi (Casca) Daniel Le (Trebonius) Neil Patrick Stewart (Decius Brutus) Gardiner Comfort (Metellus Cimber) Perry Jackson (Cinna) James Waterston (Mark Antony) Thomas Kelly (Octavius) Will LeBow (Lepidus) Jeremy Geidt (Cicero) Kunal Prasad (Soothsayer)
Jazz trio
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Project HistoryWritten in 1599 for the opening of The Globe Theatre and right before Hamlet, Julius Caesar is the first in a series of great tragedies. Inspired by Plutarch, he wrote it at a critical moment of the history of England : the rebellion of Essex against Elizabeth I. As in Richard II (1595), the theme is the deposition of a sovereign : Julius Caesar has become a threat to the republic . Is it fair then to murder him before Rome is held totally under his absolute power that has no limits ? Julius Caesar will be created for the first time at the American Repertory Theatre and presented in France at the Centre Dramatique National d’Orléans in October 2009. After two plays by Bernard-Marie Koltes, Black Battles With Dogs (Combat de nègre et de chiens) at the 7 Stages Theater in Atlanta (2001), reprised in Chicago (2004), and Roberto Zucco at the Emory Theater in Atlanta (2004), Arthur Nauzyciel staged Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party at the American Repertory Theatre in Boston (2007). Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar at the A.R.T. is his fourth show in the United States. Linked to the prestigious Harvard University, The American Repertory Theatre is considered since its creation in 1979 as one of the most important and innovative theatres in the country. The A.R.T. was founded by Robert Brustein and has been resident for twenty-seven years at Harvard University’s Loeb Drama Center. In August 2002 Robert Woodruff became the A.R.T.’s Artistic Director, the second in the theatre’s history. In December 2002, the A.R.T. was the recipient of the National Theatre Conference’s Outstanding Achievement Award, and in May of 2003 it was named one of the top three theatres in the country by Time magazine. Here are a few names among those who worked and took part in the life of the A.R.T. : Peter Sellars, Lee Breuer, Martha Clarke, Bob Wilson, Anne Bogart, Dario Fo, Andrei Serban, David Mamet, Krystian Lupa, Joseph Chaikin, Susan Sontag, Milan Kundera, Jan Kott, Philip Glass, Don DeLillo, Robert Woodruff, Naomi Wallace, Frederick Wiseman. The A.R.T. is known for its commitment to the contemporary American theatre as well as repertory. It is also a residence for authors, directors and actors. A.R.T. productions tour all over the world : Alceste by Bob Wilson at the Festival d’Automne (Fall festival) in 1986 in Paris. In 1998 it was the first American company to open the Tchekhov festival In Moscow with Sam Shepard’s play, When the world was green. Recently the A.R.T. presented The three sisters staged by Krystian Lupa at the Edinburgh International Festival. Director's notesThough rarely seen in France, Julius Caesar is in the United States one of the best-known plays by Shakespeare. Its premiere at ART in 2008 (a presidential election year, whereas the play depicts a moment when democracy would teeter if the republic was to give away to an empire), is thus eventful. It contains in itself all the subsequent plays. It is a political play, in which language and rhetoric play a prominent part ; the power of discourse can change the course of History; the flow of words both reveals and hides their extraordinary presence. And if the world pictured in the play still resembles ours (what has changed in politics?), one nonetheless feels throughout the text a will to encompass both the visible and the invisible, the real and dream life, the living and the dead in a one-and-only unit, a singular cosmography. We are connected to the Greeks, the Romans, to Shakespeare, by a long chain which, from the beginning of time and for many centuries to come, contains, like a DNA loop, the collective memory of human fears and illusions. As Eric Hobsbawm wrote in The Age of Extremes: “ The short twentieth century ended in problems, for which nobody had, or even claimed to have, solutions. As the citizens of the fin de siècle tapped their way through the global fog that surrounded them, into the third millennium, all they knew for certain was that an era of history had ended. They knew very little else.” We have yet to come to terms with the dark side of this century. Whenever I confront myself with a classical text, I have the feeling I ought to direct a “memory for the future”. The classics are like the Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes. The characters project themselves into the future, in which they will be the spectators of their own past, in which their acts will be a spectacle for others to see. Like a testimony for the future of what we are and were. We are in Boston. The theatre was built in 1964. Pop culture in the United States then had never been so dominant, the world so loud, there were images everywhere and all was appearance: that is why I want to place the play in the sixties, during the years when one wanted to believe that Kennedy would open onto a new era, when a crowd became a mass, when the image won over the word, when the most innovative and significant artistic trends were born in this country (architects, performers, performance art, photography, collage, reproduction).
Arthur Nauzyciel, octobre 2007
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version française
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