For the Joy of Theater: Julius Caesar at CHAW

Logo courtesy of the Capital City Players of Washington DC

Some of us love the theater.  It’s more than just dialogue on paper: it’s an exhilarating feeling of imagining situations coming to life and of how to deliver them in a most powerful way.  It’s the way the words convey so much more; the clever asides; the soliloquies exposing real motives, and the monologues conveying so much more than just the sum of their words put together.  Theater is about not just enjoying the medium, but breathing into it new life.  The Capital City Players of DC’s lovely performance of Julius Caesar at CHAW is along these lines: it is performed by a great group of dedicated thespians clearly enjoying bringing one of Shakespeare’s best plays to life.

The players do a great job of working with an intimate and sparse venue like the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop’s Blackbox Theatre.  From the outset, the bare stage, minimum amount of props, and choice of costumes (with nary a toga in sight) sets a serious and modern tone: favoring instead the drab-but-direct Washington uniform of suits and pencil skirts making the play modern and bringing the setting home, so to speak.  It mostly works: the beautifully-written words come through without the aid of either togas or more scenery than a couple of actors can cart off at a time.  (Although it must be said: please make sure your uniformed troops look a little more cohesive in the war camp scenes!)

The principals– Brutus, Caesar, Cassius and Mark Antony, played by David Dieudonne, Hugh Hill, Louis Pangaro and Nello DeBlasio respectively– are competently delivered.  Mark Antony’s famous, “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” speech –that slick political maneuver that proves to be the undoing of all of Caesar’s conspirators– was delivered with particular energy and art on opening night; it provided a nice foil to Brutus’s careful and cerebral speech, also moving in its own more restrained way.  The energy throughout the production was kept high and tight like a Marine’s haircut, and there were some notable interjections by the supporting cast– a flamboyant Casca played by Wayne Henson was a great humorous addition, amid all the gloom and doom of tragedy, for instance.

If you’re looking for a fun escape while giving you some good food for thought (for instance, Mark Antony: calculating snake or loyal friend?), go enjoy Julius Caesar from the Capital City Players.  The show will be running November 18-20  and December 2, 3, 4, 9, 10 and 11 and tickets are only $18 for general admission ($15 for students and seniors).  The Blackbox Theater is located at 545 7th Street, SE.