twi-ny recommended events

TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL: BEFORE MIDNIGHT

Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) are back together again in Richard Linklater’s BEFORE MIDNIGHT

BEFORE MIDNIGHT (Richard Linklater, 2013)
Wednesday, April 24, Clearview Cinemas Chelsea 8, 6:45
www.tribecafilm.com
www.sonyclassics.com/beforemidnight

Unable to resist revisiting the characters who first fell in love in 1995’s Before Sunrise and again in 2004’s Before Sunset, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy reprise their roles as Jesse and Celine, respectively, in Richard Linklater’s absolutely wonderful Before Midnight. The couple first met on a train to Vienna in 1994, talking at length about their hopes and desires and planning on getting together in six months’ time, but they don’t reconnect for another nine years, when Celine comes to one of Jesse’s book signings in Paris. In real time, they walk around the City of Light, catching up on what has happened in their lives as Jesse prepares to take a plane back home to his wife and son. And now another nine years have passed, and Jesse and Celine are living together, the parents of twins (Charlotte and Jennifer Prior). As the film opens, the divorced Jesse is putting his teenage son, Hank (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick), on a plane after having spent the summer together in Greece. What follows is a marvelous fourteen-minute scene of Jesse driving down a mountain road as he and Celine essentially let the audience know what has occurred over the last nine years: They have twin girls (sleeping in the back), Celine has been offered an important environmental job, and Jesse is considering moving to Chicago to be closer to Hank. They return to a country estate owned by Patrick (award-winning cinematographer Walter Lassally, making his acting debut at the age of eighty-six), who is hosting an outdoor lunch with a group of friends (including French actress Ariane Labed, coproducer and filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari, and Xenia Kalogeropoulou, who came out of retirement to appear in her first picture since 1985). They all talk of life and love, with Celine being particularly charming. But when Jesse and Celine go off to a hotel room for what is supposed to be a romantic rendezvous, some things are said and truths revealed that complicate things.

Cowriters Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke explore life and love in Greece in third film about Celine and Jesse

As with the first two films, Before Midnight consists of long takes of Jesse and Celine discussing their past, present, and future as cowriters Linklater (Slacker, Dazed and Confused), Delpy, and Hawke, who were nominated for an Oscar for their script for Before Sunset, continue to explore these engaging characters; both the dialogue and the acting have matured with an intelligent grace and elegance that are captivating. The couple wanders around Messinia examining their lives as only fortysomethings can, trying to figure out whether what they have is what they want. The central focus, though, once again is time, whether it is the years Jesse and Celine have spent together, the time they have left, time as a concept in Jesse’s semiautobiographical novels, or Jesse making a joke about being a time traveler. It’s been eighteen years since we first met Jesse and Celine, and we’ve grown eighteen years older too, lending fascinating perspectives that can’t help but force us to take a look at our own lives as well. The trilogy is America’s version of François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series, filled with humor, lyricism, and an inherent understanding of twenty-first-century realities. Will there be a fourth film in nine years? As of now, the principals aren’t saying because they just don’t know, but Before Midnight ends on just about the perfect ambiguous note.

WAVERLY MIDNIGHTS: HOLY MOTORS

Léos Carax’s HOLY MOTORS is a dazzling tribute to Paris, cinema, and the art of storytelling

LATE-NIGHT FAVORITES: HOLY MOTORS (Léos Carax, 2012)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Friday, April 26, and Saturday, April 27, 12:05 am
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.holymotorsfilm.com

French writer-director Léos Carax (Boy Meets Girl, Mauvais Sang) has made only five feature films in his thirty-plus-year career, a sadly low output for such an innovative, talented director, but he has now given birth to his masterpiece, the endlessly intriguing, confusing, and exhilarating Holy Motors. His first film since 1999’s POLA X, the new work is a surreal tale of character and identity, spreading across multiple genres in a series of bizarre, entertaining, and often indecipherable set pieces. Holy Motors opens with Carax himself playing le Dormeur, a man who wakes up and walks through a hidden door in his room and into a movie theater where a packed house, watching King Vidor’s The Crowd, is fast asleep. The focus soon shifts to Carax alter ego Denis Lavant as Monsieur Oscar, a curious character who is being chauffeured around Paris in a white stretch limo driven by the elegant Céline (Édith Scob). Oscar has a list of assignments for the day that involve his putting on elaborate costumes — including revisiting his sewer character from Merde, Carax’s contribution to the 2009 omnibus Tokyo! that also included shorts by Michel Gondry and Bon Joon-ho — and becoming immersed in scenes that might or might not be staged, blurring the lines between fiction and reality within, of course, a completely fictional world to begin with. It is as if each scene is a separate little movie, and indeed, Carax, whose middle name is Oscar, has said that he made Holy Motors after several other projects fell through, so perhaps he has melded many of those ideas into this fabulously abstruse tale that constantly reinvents itself. The film is also a loving tribute to Paris, the cinema, and the art of storytelling, with direct and indirect references to Franz Kafka, E. T. A. Hoffman, Charlie Chaplin, Lon Chaney, Eadweard Muybridge, Georges Franju, and others. (Scob, who starred in Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, at one point even pulls out a mask similar to the one she wore in that classic thriller.) The outstanding cast also features Kylie Minogue, who does indeed get to sing; Eva Mendes as a robotic model; and Michel Piccoli as the mysterious Man with the Birthmark. Holy Motors returns for a pair of midnight screenings at the IFC Center following its four-month run there; catch it while you can on the big screen and prepare to be dazzled.

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF FILM: NAKED

Mike Leigh’s award-winning NAKED will have a special screening at the IFC Center on April 25

NAKED (Mike Leigh, 1993)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Thursday, April 25, 7:00
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

In writer-director Mike Leigh’s controversial Naked, David Thewlis is mesmerizing as Johnny, a drifter on the run from Manchester who shows up at the London apartment of an old girlfriend, Louise (Lynda Steadman), and develops a strange attraction for Louise’s roommate, Sophie (the excellent Katrin Cartlidge). Leigh, who earned Best Director honors at Cannes for the film, fills Naked with desperate characters, desolate streets, and plenty of graphic, lurid detail. Thewlis won numerous acting awards for his brilliant portrayal of a very difficult character for the audience to care about, especially in a film that runs more than two hours. Sitting through Naked is an exhausting, infuriating, ultimately rewarding experience; among the best scenes are the philosophical conversations Johnny has with the night watchman (Peter Wight). Naked is screening in a high-definition digital projection on April 25 as part of the IFC Center series “The Modern School of Film” and will be followed by a discussion with Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam.

TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL: KISS THE WATER

Documentary examines mysterious life of a master maker of fly-fishing lures in the Scottish countryside

VIEWPOINTS: KISS THE WATER (Eric Steel, 2013)
Wednesday, April 24, Clearview Cinemas Chelsea 4, 5:30
Saturday, April 27, Clearview Cinemas Chelsea 9, 7:30
Sunday, April 28, AMC Loews Village 7, 7:00
www.tribecafilm.com

Documentarian Eric Steel weaves together his second film, Kiss the Water, with a care and artistry similar to that his subject, Megan Boyd, employed when crafting remarkably beautiful and intricate fly-fishing lures. Steel, who made his debut with 2006’s The Bridge, about the history of suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge, makes a gentler but no less fascinating splash with his follow-up, inspired by Boyd’s obituary, which he held on to for ten years before deciding to investigate the story. Boyd was a somewhat reclusive and mysterious woman who lived by herself in the Scottish countryside by the North Sea. There, like a kind of Rumpelstiltskin, she made such amazing fishing lures as the Jock Scott, the Silver Doctor, and the Durham Ranger, which fly-fishers used on the region’s world-famous salmon runs, where salmon flock to spawn, not eat. Steel talks to a handful of people who knew Boyd, painting a portrait of a rather eclectic woman who seems to have emerged from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. Steel also includes atmospheric animation by Em Cooper as well as shots of some of Boyd’s fans re-creating their favorite lures, hand made with love and respect. Among her best customers was Prince Charles, which led to Boyd being awarded the British Empire Medal by Queen Elizabeth II. It turns out that Boyd was not a fly-fisher herself, and she was not thrilled that her unique folk art was used to ultimately kill fish, but she had a talent she could not give up. Like the solitary fly-fisher, Boyd spent much of her time alone as well, but with Steel’s charming, engaging film, she should now make a whole new group of friends and admirers.

TWI-NY TALK: ANDREW MASULLO

Andrew Masullo’s canvases are like eye candy for the heart and soul (photo courtesy Mary Boone Gallery)

Mary Boone Gallery
541 West 24th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through April 27, free
212-752-2929
www.maryboonegallery.com

Every time Andrew Masullo starts a new painting, he has no idea how it will turn out. The New Jersey-born-and-raised artist, who spent much of his career in New York City before moving to San Francisco in 2005, doesn’t preplan what shapes and colors he will use on generally smaller-size canvases, just letting the creative process flow out of him. Sometimes it takes a few months to complete a work, and sometimes many years, and even then he might decide at the last minute that the painting looks better upside down or sideways. (He did go through a brief period in which he employed a paint-by-numbers system.) Last year Masullo scored a unique triple play, being included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial — something that was extra satisfying given that he had been fired from an administrative job at the institution three decades earlier — as well as Pulse and Volta. Masullo currently has a sparkling show up at Mary Boone, where dozens of his nonobjective works are grouped on the walls, from a collection of colorful canvases arranged around one corner to a series of eight small pieces lined up in a horizontal row, almost military-style. Primarily featuring straight-from-the-tube colors in geometric patterns that play with negative space, the paintings are extremely pleasing to experience, like eye candy for the heart and soul. The exhibit was organized in conjunction with his regular New York gallery, Feature Inc., which is run by the single-named Hudson, and continues through April 27. Masullo, who has quite a sly sense of humor, recently discussed the show and more from his home in San Francisco.

twi-ny: You are undergoing a major resurgence of late, being singled out last year at the Whitney Biennial, Volta, and Pulse, and now you have a big solo show at Mary Boone. Has this sudden burst of attention surprised you?

Andrew Masullo: A resurgence is about the career, which is very different from the work itself. That kind of hoopla doesn’t help me make the next painting so I don’t pay it too much attention.

twi-ny: What was it like being asked to participate in the Whitney Biennial after having been fired from the Whitney many years before?

Andrew Masullo: My reaction to being included in the Biennial was amazement mixed with an equal portion of “it’s about damned time.”

Eight small works are spread out along one long wall in Andrew Masullo’s show at Mary Boone (photo courtesy Mary Boone Gallery)

twi-ny: You let your paintings develop on their own, without preconceived notions of size, color, or shape of image. What about the process of hanging your work, specifically for the Mary Boone show? Is there a similar randomness, or is it much more carefully planned and organized? The canvases, especially the eight small pieces along one wall, really seem to work in the cavernous space.

Andrew Masullo: The hanging was both planned out ahead of time (the sparer walls) and figured out on the spot (the more complicated walls) and it was mostly Hudson’s baby. I was the splinter in the kitty’s paw, complaining when something didn’t feel right, moving a few pictures from here to there, until the installation sounded like a Handel aria (harpsichord and all).

twi-ny: You like to work while listening to classical music and watching television. What composers and TV shows were you checking out while creating the work on view at Mary Boone?

Andrew Masullo: While I was making the paintings? I never listen to classical music while painting but it doesn’t mean that it’s not swimming around inside me. Mozart and Berg hold special places in my heart but for the past few years I’ve listened mostly to Handel’s operas and oratorios (I swear I have been, or will be, a countertenor in some past or future life).

I paint listening to either news shows or junk shows and not much in between.

twi-ny: You’ve cited Joseph Cornell, Florine Stettheimer, Forrest Bess, Augusto Giacometti, and Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart as some of your favorite artists. Are there any current, living artists that get you excited?

Andrew Masullo: Franz West, but he died.

twi-ny: You were born and raised in New Jersey, went to school at Rutgers, and were part of the downtown New York City art scene of the 1980s, but in the early 2000s you moved out to San Francisco. Do you miss living on the East Coast? Throughout your career, how do you think your surroundings affected your work?

Andrew Masullo: I’m a New York painter through and through. New York City was my classroom for over two decades — the people, the streets, the galleries, the museums. I sucked as much juice out of New York as possible. When it became clear that the tables had turned and New York was sucking the juice out of me, I vamoosed to San Francisco. Without having thrown myself into the madhouse that is New York City, I would have never learned to paint. There would have been no me.

twi-ny: Your alma mater, Rutgers, is currently immersed in a scandal involving mental and physical abuse of the basketball players by the coaches. Have you been following that? Not to belittle that serious situation, but have you ever had art teachers who were particularly tough on you?

Andrew Masullo: I’m not following the Rutgers story. As for my own days at Rutgers, there’s only one tragic-filled event I can think of. One semester I received a B in painting class while Martha, a well-intentioned but untalented student, received an A. When I asked for an explanation the teacher told me that Martha had lived up to her full potential, whereas I had not. I knew in my heart the teacher was right. It’s a lesson I still carry with me.

TWI-NY TALK: NICK VAUGHAN & JAKE MARGOLIN: A MARRIAGE: 1 (SUBURBIA)

Nick and Jake collaborate both personally and professionally, using their life together as a starting point in their art

HERE
145 Sixth Ave. at Dominick St.
April 23 – May 4 (Tuesday – Sunday, 8:30), $10 in advance, $20 within twenty-four hours
Installation free Tuesday – Sunday 2:00 – 10:00
212-647-0202
www.here.org
www.nickandjakestudio.com

Married couple and professional partners Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin have taken over HERE, filling the downtown arts center with the multimedia immersive presentation A Marriage: 1 (Suburbia). Employing the visual sensibility of Gilbert & George, Nick and Jake examine what has become of the American Dream and the concept of the nuclear family through photography, video, performance, and installation that will continue to evolve from April 23 through May 4. In the art exhibit, which is free, they employ maps that have been reconfigured to portray superimposed families on them and/or video of the two men in the background; pages from John Updike’s Rabbit Run torn out and put on a wall, with highlighted phrases and blue lines connecting them to tell a different kind of suburban story; a hallway of colorful light boxes depicting the conventional 1950s ideal of the American family; and wall sketches that will be added to over the course of the two weeks. Every night will feature a sixty-minute live show ($10 in advance, $20 within twenty-four hours) featuring text written by Jessica Almasy and performed by Jess Barbagallo, with long-duration actions by Brandon Hutchinson and Libby King (April 23-25), Sean Donovan (April 26-30), and Chantal Pavageaux (May 1-4); brand-new Guggenheim Fellow and award-winning choreographer Faye Driscoll serves as consulting director.

“It was super fun for me to work with Nick and Jake; they are both so earnest, humble, and smart and amazingly open inside their process,” says Driscoll. “I loved working on ideas around performance in a visual art context; it opened up my thinking around my own work and gave me some new structures of making, and permission for a different type of exploration. But I think it really helped that all three of us have backgrounds in working in theater. We very easily found a common language around dramaturgical questions and rigor. And we all have an easy willingness to engage in the labor involved in making things. We did a lot of figuring out on our feet, which is how I think best. I think in A Marriage there is clear play with that merged and excessive space of togetherness of coupledom, but as opposed to the work just becoming insular and exclusive, there is actually something deeply generous and activist happening in what Nick and Jake are creating.” At the center of that togetherness and activism is an exploration of America’s changing relationship with same-sex marriage. Nick and Jake, who are still part of the TEAM arts collective where they met, discussed that and more as they prepared for the start of this fascinating undertaking.

twi-ny: Did either of you grow up in the suburbs?

Jake: Neither of us grew up in the suburbs. We both grew up in small university cities, Nick in Fort Collins, Colorado, and I in Berkeley, California. I think it’s safe to say that we both grew up with a healthy distrust of the suburbs — growing up, my family hosted a singing group at our house in which Malvina Reynolds’s “Little Boxes” was a pretty frequent request. Growing up with parents who had no interest in the suburban version of the American Dream is part of why I grew up thinking that the suburbs were for other people. But I also felt that because I was gay it wasn’t an option, even if I wanted it. I grew up knowing a fair number of kids who lived in the suburbs of the Bay Area, and many of them were nonwhite, and not wealthy, which I mention only to say that I didn’t have a view of the suburbs as a place that was exclusively white or monied. But my sense of it was that the suburbs were exclusively heterosexual. And as I realized that I didn’t fit into that, I had a real sense that even had I wanted anything to do with the suburbs, I wouldn’t be welcome — that the ’burbs weren’t for people like me.

twi-ny: What do you think has happened to that American Dream since your were kids?

Jake: When we talk about the “American Dream” we are talking about the heteronormative version that aspires to a suburban nuclear family. There are as many different versions of the American Dream as there are people in this country, so I just want to clarify that we are using it as a cliché. And I think a major shift has happened since we were kids, which is that this version of the American Dream is now opened up to include LGBTQ people. Even growing up in a hyperliberal place, I had a sense of gay people as being abnormal – a deviance from the norm that are tolerated because Berkeleyites are tolerant and open-minded people, but still a group of people who are in some way going to have to live on the outside of mainstream society. As many things about gay culture have been accepted into the mainstream since we were kids, now that set of aspirations that were traditionally exclusively for heterosexuals, aspirations towards suburbia, the nuclear family, and all of that – are on the table.

Nick and Jake explore the suburban ideal of the American Dream in immersive multimedia installation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

twi-ny: An earlier part of A Marriage at HERE included your watching twenty hours of Fox News. What are your feelings toward America’s evolving relationship with same-sex marriage, primarily as portrayed in the media?

Jake: That piece was trying to get at how we are surrounded by these media portrayals of same-sex marriage, almost swimming in these sound bites. And we’d been floored by the general tone on Fox News about same-sex marriage – it felt so belittling whenever we saw it. That said, I should fess up that Nick and I don’t own a TV, and other than when we are on tour with the TEAM or other projects (or holing up in motels to make art pieces), we watch very little TV. Probably my greatest exposure to how the media portrays same-sex marriage is the package of clippings from the New York Times and various Bay Area publications on the topic that my mother sends us every few months.

In general I am so thrilled by the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage, both by the country in general and by the media that I am exposed to. Thrilled and grateful for the hard work and sacrifices that have been made by so many people to make this happen. However, I feel a certain ambivalence about this acceptance because I wonder who’s terms this acceptance is on. I wonder about the sense that we are accepted as long as we conform to a version of heteronormative social structures that people have spent the last however long – forty years? – trying to dismantle. I grew up with plenty of models of people living outside the construct of marriage – whether it be raising a family with their partner and never getting married or remaining single. So while Nick and I have a pretty traditional marriage in all respects other than our gender, I don’t have a sense that it is an inherently superior situation than any other. It just works for us.

As we were creating this piece, this ambivalence felt very strong – a real sense of “Now we have the option of fitting into all this iconography, but do we want to have anything to do with it? This inevitable-feeling march towards the mainstream, do we want it or are we losing something really important tied to our heritage as a people relegated to being the Other.” And then the Prop 8 case gets argued in front of the Supreme Court, and when I hear the justices waffling about “Is this really the right time?” and “Can’t we just wait for the states to decide on their own?” I find that I swing completely in the opposite direction and feel strongly, “How dare anyone say that I am different or that our relationship is in any way inferior” and find that I want that mainstream acceptance – that I feel completely entitled to it.

twi-ny: Among your collaborators is one of our favorite people, Faye Driscoll. How did that collaboration come about?

Nick: She’s one of our favorite people too! I first met Faye when I designed the set for Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge a few years ago. For the third section of the epic piece (which Faye choreographed) we stripped the space bare and taped out “‘scenery’ on the wall.” I’ve been following her work ever since and have collaborated on a couple of operas which she choreographed and I designed.

It was after the premiere of You’re Me at the Kitchen, though, that Jake and I decided to ask her to help us out with this project. She has such a clear and deceptively simple way of cutting to the core of visual ideas. You always have the sense watching her work that things are actually happening, that there’s a real exchange taking place. She’s also one of the smartest people I know. It seemed, therefore, only natural to ask her to help us curate and develop the eleven nightly actions for our piece, none of which is dance, per-se. . . .

twi-ny: The images of you and Jake in the installation evoke the work of Gilbert and George. Did they serve as any kind of influence or inspiration?

Nick: Absolutely. I don’t know if it would have been possible for the two of us as a couple and artistic team not to address Gilbert and George in some way. At some level I think their work was probably influencing us from the very beginning of our collaborations, but I don’t know that we realized it until their retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum a few years ago.

I think there is a very different approach to performance and it’s something that has certainly come up multiple times as we’ve developed the nightly actions. G&G were revolutionary in that they presented themselves as objects, stripped (or at least muted) of identity. Our presence in our work (hopefully) serves to frame the world through our eyes so you’re looking with us, not at us.

But there are small references peppered throughout the piece: There’s a large wax panel work that bears a slight reference to G&G in its framing. There are three sprayed-paint performances that I think in some way give a little nod to the silver and red body paint of the duo. But there are also other little nods to other artists who have inspired us.

There’s a piece in the downstairs hallway (and bathrooms) that lightly reference this wonderful Sol Lewitt piece Jake and I saw at MassMOCA last year in which he took an art criticism journal and diligently connected every use of the word “art” so you got this strange kind of matrix and it turned the text into this impenetrable geometric construction. We’ve taken a much looser approach, deconstructing John Updike’s Rabbit Run and attempting to give some kind of graphic anchor to the images that feel related, from a very subjective set of criteria.

Installation includes geographic portraits made of cut maps emphasizing negative space (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

twi-ny: You met while working together at the Team, and now you’re married. How has the dynamic of living, working, and performing together impacted your relationship?

Jake: One thing we joke about is that normally your spouse is the person you can come home to and gripe about work and your coworkers. . . . We can’t really do that. Our collaboration came out of conversations that we had while on tour with the TEAM as well as while on tour with Yoshiko Chuma. It feels that through the TEAM we have the most wonderful outlet for making theater with a group of the smartest and most talented people we know. And we realized that we shared an interest in installation art and how performance functions in that setting, and what started as daydreaming while on tour turned into works-in-progress at various places and ultimately this residency at HERE.

The show will change over time, with people encouraged to return to see where things have gone. Dare we read anything into the work as coming from your real-life marriage?

Jake: Each night of the show we will do a different performance action, so they will accumulate over the course of the run, while a fourteen-day-long action in which we, Brandon Hutchinson, Libby King, Sean Donovan, and Chantal Pavageaux read the entire oral arguments of Perry v. Schwarzenegger into clear bags, creating an expanding sculpture of the captured breath. We hope that people will come by later in the run to see how this has evolved, and the tickets are structured to encourage that – the ticket that you purchase is good for return visits so that people might stop by for ten minutes on a later night to check in on it all.

This question makes me laugh – I suppose it does feel like our marriage evolves over time and that if you check back in with us at a later point it will have gotten larger and more complicated and more fleshed out . . . but I suspect that is true of all relationships.

Earlier this year we were debating whether we should condense the performance actions into brief excerpts that could all be performed each night — and ultimately decided that they really only function if they are given the room to take a whole evening each — that their duration is at the core of the thing. Perhaps there’s an analogy there with our marriage, and probably with marriage in general – that it’s slow work, and things take time to breathe and grow, and that in fact this expansive time is a really good thing. A great perk of being married is that there isn’t the pressure to get things right immediately, because we’re in it for the long haul.

(A Marriage: 1 (Suburbia) runs April 23 – May 4 at HERE and will include several special programs. The April 24 performance will be preceded by “Cocktails & Context” at 7:30 and will be followed by the panel discussion “The Ambiguity of Acceptance,” and the May 1 show will be followed by a discussion moderated by Risa Shoup and featuring Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer, Erin Markey, Glenn Marla, and Tony Osso.)

JULIUS CAESAR

Royal Shakespeare Company sets JULIUS CAESAR in contemporary Africa (photo by Richard Termine)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
Through April 28, $25-$125
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

New Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director Gregory Doran makes a smashing debut with his unique take on the Bard’s Roman tragedy Julius Caesar. Inspired by the Robben Island Bible – a copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare that was annotated by South African political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, while being held on Robben Island – Doran sets the play in contemporary Africa, performed by an all-black British cast. The action begins about fifteen minutes prior to curtain, as a group of men and women have gathered for a political rally, holding up signs that read “Caesar” and dancing to live music (by Akintayo Akinbode) played by a small band using traditional instruments. They also share their faith in Caesar with early-arriving audience members sitting down front, talking to them and handing them flyers. The loose, fun atmosphere is soon interrupted by the appearance of Julius Caesar himself (Jeffery Kissoon), who is greeted by such supposed followers as Markus Brutus (Paterson Joseph), Caius Cassius (Cyril Nri), and Casca (Joseph Mydell). A wild soothsayer (Theo Ogundipe) predicts doom, but Caesar is too wrapped up in his own glory to worry too much about it. But as Caesar’s thirst for power grows, Brutus, Cassius, Casca, and others conspire to murder him, with Mark Antony (Ray Fearon) caught somewhere in the middle, trying to be a man of the people while also lamenting Caesar’s demise.

The deed is done, setting things in motion in stirring production of JULIUS CAESAR at BAM (photo by Richard Termine)

On December 16, 1977, Mandela highlighted the following passage from Julius Caesar in the Robben Island Bible: “Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once. / Of all the wonders that I yet have heard. / It seems to me most strange that men should fear; / Seeing that death, a necessary end, / Will come when it will come.” Working off that quote, Doran builds this stirring production around the concept of fear. Once the audience is seated, two guards come out, whipping their truncheons down hard, sending chilling sounds echoing through BAM’s Harvey Theater, getting everyone’s attention, both on- and offstage. Casca is afraid that Cassius might not be loyal to Caesar, Brutus is afraid that Caesar has gone mad with power, the people are afraid to be left without a strong leader, and Mark Antony is afraid for Rome’s future amid so much treachery. Looming over it all is a huge statue of Caesar, its back facing the crowd. Doran’s production is fresh and vibrant, breathing new life into what is one of Shakespeare’s most straightforward, less complex tales. It all takes place on Michael Vale’s cold, gray, multilevel concrete set, with the crowd wearing modern clothing and the main characters changing into black togas. The cast is strong, with Mydell and Joseph particularly effective in their key roles in a play that still resonates today, relating to recent revolution, assassination, and the general confusion of a conflicted citizenry. Julius Caesar continues at BAM through April 28, with members of the company participating in an Artist Talk following the April 26 performance.