Caesar Summer

This summer a bunch of us put on Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" in the local middle school auditorium.  We did it because directing this play was the dream of a local guy who graduated a few years back, went away to college and came home to Mt. Vernon for a while before going east to further his theatre education.  It wasn't our dream--most of us had never been in a Shakespeare play before, and we all had jobs and kids and kitchen remodeling and baseball and other plays to think about.  But we like this guy, and we like challenges--one of which was finding enough folks to be in the play.  We had to answer the call. 

Our director had to give up some of his original ideas--the costumer nixed the fake blood, for example--but he held fast to his vision of this four-hundred-and-some-year-old play as an allegory of modern politics.  In our play, Caesar wore a suit, Brutus wore army fatigues and Cassius was played by a woman; the audience sat on the stage with us and looked out into the empty auditorium, which represented fallen Rome.  We learned some basic fight choreography and those of us who weren't particularly convincing soldiers were killed early in the battle scene and dragged offstage (me).  I got to play several small roles and because we seldom practiced large expanses of the play together as a cast, working instead on intense smaller segments that featured the main actors, I found it a difficult task for my fifty-plus-year-old brain to follow the sequence of actions and words.  It wasn't until we were in performance that the whole story came together for me.  I could feel my neurons firing even as some of our prop cap guns refused to go off. 

"Julius Caesar" had not been one of my favorite Shakespeare plays when I read it in high school, nor when I took several Shakespeare classes in college and grad school (I was an English major, after all).  But helping to stage the play made me feel as if I were inside the story--like a character from a book who has come to life--and I was reminded all over again not only of the value of doing something difficult, but the value of drama in education.  My mother taught English to seniors in high school for many years and always had them act out the Shakespeare plays in a sort of readers' theatre in her classroom.  Recently I talked to one of my brothers on the phone and when I mentioned "Julius Caesar" he quoted, "The fault lies not in the stars, dear Brutus, but in ourselves."  It's been forty years but he still remembers this stuff.  Those lines are meant to be spoken, and learning to speak them helps us understand them better.  The next best thing is listening to them being spoken.  Next time you have a chance, be in a Shakespeare play.  Or at least, go see one.  It makes your brain smarter, even in the summer.