Julius Caesar, and: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and: Hamlet (review)

The Public Theater in New York City billed its summer season, its first in the newly emerging era of Donald Trump’s presidency, as the “summer of Shakespeare,” presenting ambitious, and in some cases quite radical, productions of some of the best-known of Shakespeare’s plays. As part of their annual “Shakespeare in the Park” festival at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, they presented Julius Caesar, directed by the Public’s artistic director Oskar Eustis, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by the founder and resident director of the Public’s Public Works program, Lear deBessonet. Downtown, at Astor Place, the company presented Hamletin a production by Tony Award-winning director Sam Gold and featuring the movie star Oscar Isaac, now a sensation in Star Wars. Yet the artistic ambition that drove these three productions, while ensuring (for the most part) memorable productions with fascinating artistic choices, also served, at times, as a double-edged sword, providing audiences with theater that was polarizing, uneven, and in some places misconceived. In Julius Caesar, Brutus claims that the reason he killed Caesar was not because of his misdeeds or authoritarian rule, but because “as he was ambitious, I slew him” (3.2.24–25); he describes the assassination itself as “[a]mbi-tion’s debt” (3.1.82). Artistic ambition never deserves punishment, but the concepts seized upon by these directors, while exciting in theory, did not always play out effectively for the audience.

Eustis’s Julius Caesarengendered a firestorm in the American media midway through the run, about a week before it opened, when right-wing television hosts discovered that the production conceptualized Caesar as looking and behaving exceptionally like recently-inaugurated President Donald J. Trump. They argued that neither public funds nor corporate sponsorship should support nonprofit theater that depicts the assassination of the President of the United States (or at least a character styled clearly to evoke him). Bank of America pulled its sponsorship from the production, Delta Air Lines ended its four-year...