Commentary: Once upon a time, when this columnist was beginning a career as an actor, one of the first producers who gave me a job was Oskar Eustis. He is at the center of a controversy this week over a production of Shakespeare’s “Tragedy of Julius Caesar” in New York City. Anyone who has worked with Oskar or engaged him in conversation can guess two things as this illiterate scandal roils around his new production. One, Eustis certainly does not endorse assassination; and two, part of him must be thrilled that a play is arousing controversy in 2017.
The production is part of the annual summer season at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, a prominent event in American theatre. Shakespeare’s play depicts the assassination of the tyrannical Caesar by conspirators who believe they are defending the republic. The murder takes place in Act III, Scene 1, in a play with five acts. The second half of the play shows the tragic consequences of the assassination, how violence in defense of republicanism is self-defeating even if the ruler is what Trump might call “a bad hombre.” As Eustis wrote in his program note, “To fight the tyrant does not mean imitating him.” This is an essentially republican, non-revolutionary message.
There is nothing frivolous about setting this play in modern times, considering our history of assassination and how casually we engage in figurative calls for violence. Obama was lynched in effigy outside the White House, and today Trump is historically unpopular as measured in opinion polls.
The play is an excellent read, and part of its greatness is a political universality that lends itself to a variety of historical settings. You could perform it in Roman togas, of course, as the themes are fundamental and easily accessible to an audience willing to listen and watch. Historically, productions often incorporate current political settings and issues. You might portray Caesar as a 20th century fascist akin to Mussolini, as Orson Welles did in one famous production. Many American productions have dressed the characters in suits and visually located the play in the American republic. Caesar has been depicted as a Kennedy, as Reagan and Obama - and in Eustis’s new production, Caesar appears in the unmistakable guise of Donald Trump, our current president.
Cue the outrage. Corporate sponsors Delta Airlines and Bank of America immediately pulled their support for the production, and conservative media outlets such as Fox and Breitbart dished up red meat stories about liberal theatre artists gleefully showing Donald Trump being stabbed to death. Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, questioned whether taxpayer funds were supporting the production, and the National Endowment for the Arts was compelled to confirm that no federal money was granted to the production.
As news broke Wednesday morning of the shooting of a member of Congress, this production was used to bash pinko elites for stoking violence, staging a play written by liberal snowflake William Shakespeare calling for Trump’s assassination 347 years before Trump was even born. That’s how nefarious they are.
The mistake is clear to anyone who actually reads the play. Whether you dress Caesar up as an American president or a foreign dictator, the play remains a repudiation of violence as a means of restoring order. Yet here we are, once again bringing a book to a barfight. An exuberant ignorance and intellectual poverty starves public discourse.
Perhaps it is time to print up some red caps with the slogan, “Make America Literate Again.”
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Algernon D’Ammassa writes the “Desert Sage” column for the Deming Headlight and Sun News papers. Write to him at adammassa@demingheadlight.com.