INTERVIEW: New ‘Julius Caesar’ production set in all-girls high school

Julius Caesar has been interpreted in many different ways. From the all-female staging a few years ago at Donmar Warehouse to the controversial Public Theater production that recently ran in Central Park, the high-stakes drama inspires theatrical interpreters to take the material in many different directions.

The latest staging comes courtesy of Pocket Universe, a new theatrical company headed by Alyssa May Gold. This time around, the scheming of Roman senators is set in an all-girls high school. Performances begin today, June 21, and run through July 8 at the Access Theater Gallery Space in New York City.

Gold, who is also an associate producer for BEDLAM theater company, created the modern-day interpretation and also plays the character of Brutus. She is helped on stage by Déa Julien, Violeta Picayo, Madeline Wolf, Miranda Cornell and Amie Tedesco. The production is directed by Katie Young.

“This began when I saw Julius Caesar for the first time,” Gold said in a recent phone interview. “I saw it two years ago. I’d never read it before, and I was stunned that when Brutus came on stage and started talking, I felt like I was watching a teenage version of myself. And the way that he as a character works through his feelings and tries to use logic to explain inexplicably intense emotions, it felt so teenage, and I started then, as I watched the rest of the play, thinking about could you do this whole thing with teenagers. And I started developing it from there and kind of thinking about how we would translate all of it into a school.”

Gold, who was seen in Broadway’s Arcadia, started collaborating with Young and eventually recruited a full cast to play all the iconic parts, including Marc Antony, Cassius, Casca, Lucius and, of course, the title character.

“It was fascinating when we got all these girls talking about it and looking at the text, how much we all started to relate our own experiences of being young women and going through power struggles and changing friend groups and the kind of human experience that these characters go through,” Gold said. “It felt so relatable, and so I knew by the end of the workshop, I had to find a way to do a full production. And then I spent the last year and a half kind of putting all the pieces together to do this now.”

There are not many changes to the text itself. William Shakespeare’s words are largely intact; however, they did change pronouns. It was important for Gold and the company to honor the Bard’s original idea and also let the concept work without too much pushing.

“You never want to force a concept onto the text,” Gold said. “The concept should be there to open the text up further. We’re dealing with it in a little bit more of a metaphorical, psychological landscape as opposed to literally doing a war in a school, and that helped us preserve the text more so than I think we would have been able to try to literally stage a civil war at school. For the most part, we kept the play intact.”

The rehearsals have been extensive. The company began with a week of table work, going through the relationships in the play, understanding the story and deciphering behaviors. “It’s really exciting and interesting being in the room with this group of people because everybody is so creative and collaborative,” she said.

One of the positives for Gold is the chance to work with Young, the director.

“Yes, I love her,” Gold said. “She’s so creative. Her background is mostly in stage management, and as a stage manager, I’ve gotten to work with her. You watch the way that her mind works, and she’s incredibly organized. And she knows how to take care of the administrative side of keeping a production together, but the way that she watches a scene and figures … wouldn’t it be cool if we had this, and then makes it out of something. And then suddenly we’re working with a whole new design element.”

Gold started Pocket Universe, which is presenting Julius Caesar, because it seemed the most logistically sound way to go about the project. The company will allow her to brand the production and build an audience around the idea of taking classic theatrical conventions and reexamining them.

Reexamination is the key to this new production.

“What I find the most interesting is that there’s never been a moment of, ‘I don’t understand what this character feels because I’m a woman, and he’s a Roman senator,’ and that was my hope,” Gold said. “That was my guess about what would happen, and it’s been wonderful to see that that’s the case, that Shakespeare wrote human. He wrote about the human experience, and he wrote about universally human traits. And once you open that up to women, it suddenly allows us to just be human and allows us to connect to the universal human experience. And that’s been so exciting to watch happen in the room, and I think that’s been the most unusual and unexpected piece of this was almost how readily people took to these roles and found their common ground as humans.”

She added: “I think it’s really exciting when everyone starts to realize that just because this is the way something has always been done, it’s not the way that it has to keep being done. … There’s also something interesting that I was reading in preparation for this about how Shakespeare men vs. women. Women were also written for men because women were never going to play them because women weren’t allowed to act, and once you start to think that all of his roles were actually written for men, then it kind of becomes a free for all because there was never a place for women in these plays. So it serves to reason if he was writing Juliet and Brutus for the same person, why can’t I play both?”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Pocket Universe’s Julius Caesar begins Wednesday, June 21 at the Access Theater Gallery Space in New York City. The production runs through July 8. Click here for more information and tickets.