Riverside Theatre staging ‘Julius Caesar’ with modern parallels

Because of William Shakespeare’s “The Tragedy of Julius Caesar,” we know to “beware the Ides of March,” the backstabbing phrase “Et tu, Brute?” and the most famous utterance: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears … ”

But the most prophetic phrase from Shakespeare’s quill is: “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.”

If history books have painted Caesar as a brutal leader, Shakespeare has penned a cautionary tale that not only spoke to the politics of Queen Elizabeth I’s realm when he wrote it, but continues to resonate 425 years later.

His prescient message will play out when Riverside Theatre brings its annual free Shakespeare production to Iowa City’s Lower City Park from June 14 to 30, 2024.

If you go

What: Riverside Theatre presents Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”

Where: Festival Stage, Lower City Park, 200 Park Rd., Iowa City

When: June 14 to 30; 7:30 p.m. Thursday to Sunday

Admission: Free, general admission seating, no ticket reservations required

Extras: Green Show on the side stage 30 minutes before showtime, where the plot is explained; lawn games available; Oasis falafels food truck on-site; snacks and beverages at the stage concession stand; or bring a picnic and dine in the park

Details: riversidetheatre.org/caesar/

The Plot

On its website, Riverside Theatre explains the show as “Shakespeare’s classic tale of power and politics. … Rome is held in the grip of the popular, potentially dangerous ruler Julius Caesar. A group of noble senators, led by Brutus, undertakes a desperate plot to save the Republic they love. But Marc Antony, backed by the people of Rome, has his own plans, culminating in a fateful battle for the soul of the country.”

Director Adam Knight reached out to Cedar Rapids native Elliott Bales, 63, now based in Washington, D.C., to portray Caesar. Not only is Bales a veteran of stage and screen, he also is a retired Army colonel, which Knight said brings a deeper layer of understanding to the role.

“For me, it’s important that Caesar be a towering presence, both in terms of ability and personality, but also in stature, and Elliott has all three of those things,” Knight said. “He also brings with him the life experience of being a veteran in the armed services. And so the understanding he brings of Caesar’s life, who in many ways preferred being on a military campaign than he did sitting in Rome, ruling, has just yielded so much to the rehearsal room and to our interpretation of this play.”

It’s no secret that Caesar dies, but he dies early enough that Bales only gets to embody that character in the first half of the play, and cast new light on preconceived notions.

“It’s nice to be able to bring maybe a less stereotypical Caesar,” Bales said. “He’s usually portrayed as sort of just arrogant ‘that guy,’ as opposed to somebody who’s trying to take care of people.” The Riverside version gives the actor “a chance to do something a little different, and put a little twist on the story and make people wonder about whether his spirit is right or wrong.”

The back story

“Shakespeare wrote this during a time of a lot of questions,” said Knight, who also serves as Riverside’s producing artistic director. “Elizabeth was really at the height of her power. But also, there were a lot of questions about what would happen next, because she had no heir.

“Shakespeare didn’t write it to be a history lesson, he wrote it to be something that would provide a lens to his current time. And the genius of the play is that it continues to provide a lens to our current time. …

“Rome was going through a major social and political upheaval during Caesar’s time,” Knight said. “It was moving from a republic to what would eventually become an empire and a single-ruler state. And so the political discourse in Rome was incredibly heated, incredibly polarizing, and the majority of the population at any given time thought that the world was going to end — which sounds very much like our time.”

To draw more modern parallels, Riverside is setting the play in the not-so-distant past.

“We’re taking it into the 20th century, probably much to the chagrin of the actors who would probably love to be in breezy togas in the summer sun,” Knight said. “For our production, we’re setting it in Rome, in an alternate version of the 1930s. That was a time across Europe and in the United States where these larger-than-life personalities were coming to the fore. And there were a lot of questions in nearly every Western country about, ‘Who are we? Where are we going? Are we trading greatness for freedom?’

“It was a time when these outsize personalities held power, thinking about Mussolini and Stalin, and Churchill, FDR, even Hitler in Germany. It was a time where a lot of fear was rising, so setting it in this time of the early ’30s, I think it’s capturing that paranoia and fear.

“And also the way that mass media was starting to become a major factor,” Knight added. “We have some moments where radio is being used in the play, and how that was a way, too, for leaders to communicate exponentially further than they’d ever been able to before. There was also a time of mass panic, thinking of Orson Welles and (his) ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast, and how these new mediums can accelerate social change.”

Still, the play’s days of yore text sounds foreign to modern ears.

“We artists are also having to make the leap to make these words that feel very old, our own, and to tell a story that is bigger than ourselves,” Knight said. “When you have an audience experiencing that also, they’re not only experiencing the text, they’re also experiencing this medium of the performer, the artists making the text blossom, and so you’re experiencing that in real time.

“The performers are almost instinctively meeting the audience where they are, so that give-and-take of energy and that collective rising to something bigger than ourselves, I think is what makes Shakespeare so crucial and relevant to the now. It makes it a great pleasure,” Knight said.

“And at the end of the night, we’ve all experienced something that was maybe a little intimidating at first, but we’ve all kind of climbed this mountain together.”

Youths can climb that mountain, too. Both Knight and Bales cited the time before one of the “Henry” plays that some young boys were acting out an imaginary stabbing on the side stage next to the Festival Stage. When asked what they were doing, they said they were acting out “Julius Caesar.” Which shows that it’s a story known by young people, too.

“We're not spouting blood all over the stage,” Bales said, noting that the violence is “done in a way that shouldn't be overtly shocking and horrible. Nothing these kids have not seen on television.”

The Green Show, staged 30 minutes before curtain on the nearby side stage, will give audience members an encapsulated version and explanation of what they’re about to see.

The stage

It’s believed Shakespeare wrote this work to open London’s new Globe Theater in 1599. And now “Julius Caesar” is coming to Riverside Theatre’s Festival Stage, patterned after the venerable Globe.

“The space was built with Shakespeare in mind — it was built to evoke the Globe Theatre,” Knight said. “There’s something about Shakespeare that really loves being outdoors. The connection between performer and audience is so much more palpable in that space.

“And the space doesn’t allow for a lot of trickery. You can’t just have lights go down and then all of a sudden we’re in a different space that is carved by light or by sound. It requires the performers and the text and the director to really use our imaginations and to inspire the audience to use their imaginations to fill in the gaps. That’s what Shakespeare’s audiences had to do, and they and he did it so well.”

With a cast of 17, this is the largest group Riverside has brought to the stage since making the programming free in 2018, Knight added.

“That’s more than double the largest cast we had indoors this year, so as a company, too, the space requires us to stretch in different ways and to rise to the occasion of telling these stories that are classic and part of the Western theater tradition.”

They also get to tell it among facility improvements, many of which the audiences won’t see.

“We’ve been working on renovations all spring, in partnership with (the city’s) parks and recreation department,” Knight said.

A new building behind the stage will house the actors and their dressing rooms in a more professional way. It’s a structure that evokes the Globe, Knight said, and while it’s hidden from view, Knight said it will provide actors with better entrances and exits, and provide technical personnel better, safer access for lighting and sound rigging.

“(These) aren’t things the audience will necessarily see, but it’s something the audience will feel, because what it means is that the artists they’re watching will have better tools and better accessibility to do their art,” he noted.

The city owns the Festival Stage, but the renovations were a joint financial effort with Riverside Theatre.

“Riverside set aside about $50,000 from its capital campaign to help offset the costs of these renovations,” Knight said. “(The city) contributed $250,000 to the renovations as part of a larger strategic plan for the entire Lower City Park. …

“The space was in dire need of updates,” Knight added. “It’s the first phase of what I hope is a multiphase (effort) to continue to update the space, which is more than 20 years old, to increase audience and artistic experience.”

Even the seats are 15 years old, replaced after extensive flooding in 2008. The city covers them and maintains the space during the winter, then cleans them in the spring. The recent improvements also addressed water damage to the facility, making it all more sustainable to Iowa weather changes.

“The city’s always awesome,” he said. “It’s really is a partnership to get this space that is shuttered throughout the winter, ready for an audience and ready for the show. It’s a great moment when it all comes together.”

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Elizabethan Herky

And the space has its very own Herky statue from the latest Herky on Parade effort to place 100 painted statues of the University Iowa’s mascot around Johnson County.

Naturally, this Herky is dressed in the Elizabethan garb of Shakespeare’s day. In a nod to “Hamlet,” creator Mark Lohman of Cedar Rapids titled this statue “Alas, Poor Yorick,” and placed a skull in Herky’s right hand. On a side note, Lohman is no stranger to Riverside Theatre. He designed scenery for an early Riverside production at Old Brick on the UI campus and earned a degree in the UI theater department.

Riverside Theatre’s staff members were surprised and thrilled over the statue.

“We’re so excited to house it, and what an inspirational design,” Knight said. “It’s so funny. And so folks, in addition to seeing the Green Show and playing lawn games, they should show up early to get their picture taken with Herky.”

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com