FEBRUARY 24–25, 2023
DAVID GEFFEN SCHOOL OF DRAMA AT YALE
James Bundy, Elizabeth Parker Ware Dean
Florie Seery, Associate Dean
Chantal Rodriguez, Associate Dean
Carla L. Jackson, Assistant Dean
PRESENTS
Julius Caesar
by William Shakespeareadapted by Garrett Allen and Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon
directed by Garrett Allen
Creative Team
Scenic Designer
Lia Tubiana
Costume Designer
Kiyoshi Shaw
Lighting Designer
Kyle Stamm
Sound Designer
Joe Krempetz
Projection Designer
John Horzen
Production Dramaturg
Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon
Fight and Intimacy Consultants
Kelsey Rainwater
Michael Rossmy
Stage Manager
Hannah Louise Jones
Cast in alphabetical order
Julius Caesar
Augustine Lorrie Alexandrite
Marcus Brutus
Malachi dré Beasley
Cinna the Conspirator, Octavius, Octavius’ Messenger
Michael Allyn Crawford
Mark Antony
Samuel DeMuria
Cinna the Poet, Decius, Lucius
Karl Green
Portia, Casca, Messala
Rebecca Kent
Calpurnia, Pindarus, Soothsayer
Nat Lopez
Caius Cassius
Isuri Wijesundara
Julius Caesar is performed without an intermission.
Content Guidance
This production contains graphic violence, depictions of self injury and death, mention of suicide, usage of stage blood, haze, fog, and strobe lighting.
This production is supported by The Benjamin Mordecai III Production Fund.
Artistic:
Assistant Costume Designer
Micah Ohno
Assistant Sound Designer and Engineer
Saida J.S.
Assistant Stage Manager
Josie Cooper
Production:
Associate Safety Advisor
Aholibama Castañeda González
Associate Production Manager
Timothy “TJ” Wildow
Technical Supervisor
Jason Dixon
Production Electrician
Twaha Abdul Majeed
Projection Engineer
Keira Jacobs
Projection Programmer
Ein Kim
Run Crew
B Entsminger , Jasmine Moore , Jeremy Landes , Esperanza Rosales Balcárcel , and Xi (Zoey) Lin
Administration
Associate Managing Director
Matthew Sonnenfeld
Assistant Managing Director
Natalie King
Management Assistants
Anne Ciarlone
Sarah Machiko Haber
House Manager
Spencer Knoll
Production Photographer
Maza Rey
Yale University acknowledges that Indigenous peoples and nations, including Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian speaking peoples, have stewarded through generations the lands and waterways of what is now the state of Connecticut. We honor and respect the enduring and continuing relationship that exists between these peoples and nations and this land.
The Shakespeare Repertory Projects are designed to be learning experiences that complement classroom work, providing a medium for students at David Geffen School of Drama at Yale to combine their individual talents and energies toward the staging of collaboratively created works. Your attendance meaningfully completes this process.
THE BENJAMIN MORDECAI III PRODUCTION
FUND, established by a graduate of the School, honors the memory of the Tony Award-winning producer who served as Managing Director of Yale Repertory Theatre, 1982–1993, and as Associate Dean and Chair of the Theater Management Program from 1993 until his death in 2005.
All patrons must wear masks at all times while inside the theater except when eating or drinking. Our staff, backstage crew, and artists will also be masked at all times.
The taking of photographs or the use of recording devices of any kind in the theater without the written permission of the management is prohibited.
David Geffen School of Drama productions are supported by the work of more than 200 faculty and staff members throughout the year.
Front image by Garrett Allen.
Caesar, especially Shakespeare’s Caesar, condenses leadership, with all its positive and negative qualities, into a singular figure. He has been made to symbolize both popular will and tyrannical excess; the words Kaiser, Czar, and Tsar all derive from his name. Shakespeare has been similarly overburdened with cultural significance, a single playwright rendered by decades of historiographies into a Colossus. His work has been used as a linguistic weapon in English and American imperial projects, as well as a site of artistic resistance against that very colonization.
We live among these titanic ghosts that drift through our cultural landscape, dragging accumulated meanings like tattered banners. We cannot exempt ourselves from history, therefore, nor the telling of it. Doing nothing is doing something. Therefore, what can we do, here, in this theater, with our time and our breath? We can go into the field, into the fray of meanings around our two ghosts. Into the choices that made them, and into the choices we make.
The world of this play is a version of Rome on a slant. Here, the veil of time is thin, and many parallel stories run alongside this one: the stories of every tyrant, every riot, every civil war, every political figure dubbed a Caesar or a Brutus, in all their complexity. The stories where Caesar, or the conspirators, or the people, make a different choice, or a dozen different choices. In holding this moment and examining it from many angles, we feel its justice and injustice throbbing together in a common pulse.
No matter how it is interpreted, the loss of life—beginning with Caesar’s body on the Senate floor and ending in civil war—hits us in the gut. The senators of this world use words to erase the reality of violence, but no rhetoric can counteract the sticky facts that a human is dead and the conspirators have killed him. They have witnessed the fleshy fact of another living thing’s end and must then carry that reminder of their own fragile membranes. From the moment of Caesar’s death, the people of Rome begin a violent process of making meaning, meting out honor, and setting down history. So much of what they choose to record, though it is soaked in blood, is their love for each other. Cassius, furious and vulnerable in the thick of war, reaches out for Brutus with an open heart. This fact does not stem the tide of war, but it does remind us that a person who does violence remains capable of choosing to act in love, and that matters.
Beyond the “great men” of history, I invite you to find the ensemble of Romans, who tell us other ways this story could have been told. Ancient Rome was more than tyrants, senators and soldiers. There were also wives and servants and enslaved people and prisoners. Though they were not granted the rights of Roman citizenship, they were an essential part to how Rome worked. This is not far from us. The United States runs on an underclass of labor, too. The United States is an empire too. What choices will we make? How will we live with our ghosts?
—Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon, Production Dramaturg and Co-Adaptor