“Can one man really have that much power?”
The Philadelphia Theatre Company’s recent production of “Caesar” places that question at the very center of its theatrical world. Adapted by Tyler Dobrowsky from Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” the production preserves much of Shakespeare’s original language while framing the story through contemporary anxieties about authoritarianism, democratic fragility, and public distrust. In this way, “Caesar” collapses the distance between ancient Rome and today.
From its opening moments, the production establishes this contemporary framing with striking clarity. As the lights dimmed, a video montage of political leaders speaking at international meetings was projected onto a translucent screen. Among those real-life figures appears Caesar, played by Swarthmore’s own Associate Professor of Theater Jude Sandy, dressed in a blue suit and posed against a white pillar similar to those in front of the White House.
The image is immediately reminiscent of the current debates in American politics about executive authority, authoritarian leadership, and the dangers of vesting too much power in a single individual. Caesar’s first live appearance reinforces that association: he stands at the top of a staircase, isolated in a spotlight, arms raised as if receiving the devotion of followers below. This is not a Roman dictator. This is a modern political icon.
That collision between the ancient and the contemporary is evident in the production’s visual design. As the sheer screen rises, a Roman-style urn and bench are set downstage left. Behind them, however, a large modern staircase takes over most of the upstage, disrupting any stable sense of historical distance. Similarly, Brutus (Matteo Scammell) and Cassius (J. Hernandez), with bath towels draped around their waists, look like figures from a neoclassical painting, placing the audience in an imagined Roman past. Yet that illusion is abruptly interrupted by the sharp ring of a cellphone, which pulls the audience into the present. As the scene continues, the performers change into suits onstage. This juxtaposition prevents the audience from settling into the comfort of historical drama and instead insists on folding Rome into the imagery of contemporary political life.
That direct engagement with the present becomes especially potent during Brutus’s speech at Caesar’s funeral. A lectern is placed downstage center, and Brutus directly addresses the audience as “citizens.” At one point, he asked, “Do any of you have any complaints?” The house remained silent. The pause stretched uncomfortably. Still, no one responded. The force of the moment lies in the way it exploits, what Sandy described in our conversation as “a deeply ingrained social convention of Western theatre”: audiences are trained to sit quietly, not interrupt, and follow the rules of spectatorship unless explicitly invited to do otherwise. Here, that convention becomes politically charged. The audience’s silence symbolizes a society in which people may harbor dissatisfaction yet feel unable to voice it publicly. Whether out of fear, habit, or uncertainty, they remain quiet.
If the first half of the production is especially strong in establishing its political frame, the second half grows more ambitious in its theatrical language. This shift begins in the assassination scene. After Brutus and Cassius kill Caesar, the conspirators plunge their hands into the urn and draw them back, soaked in blood. The image is clear: their hands are literally and morally bloodied. When those stained hands later touch Marc Antony (Jaime Maseda) in greeting, the production suggests that guilt, violence, and complicity spread beyond the immediate perpetrators. In that sense, blood becomes an effective theatrical image of contamination. At the same time, however, to me the prolonged smearing of blood across the bench and surrounding space feels excessive, and the artificial quality of the blood weakens the visual effect. What begins as a striking symbolic gesture gradually becomes overstated. Still, as Sandy noted, the sequence seems to prepare the audience for the more expressionistic physical language that later dominates the war scenes.
It is in those later scenes that the production most clearly shifts its focus away from political rhetoric and toward the human cost of collapse. Once civil war breaks out after Caesar’s death, the staging turns to stylized fight choreography and expressionistic physical theatre in order to fully represent war and its consequences. At one point, all four actors move repeatedly across a raised platform in synchronized patterns, resembling workers on an assembly line. The repeated gestures suggest bodies being processed like machines and pushed into war, and when the performers don bulletproof vests, the production makes clear that this is no longer only ancient Rome, but the machinery of modern warfare.
It seemed that the production tried to have actors function both as recognizable characters and as bodies sacrificed within a larger political landscape. However, when that transition from characterization and abstraction is not clearly guided, the staging becomes harder for the audience to read. One especially striking, but confusing, sequence places Brutus and Cassius on the ground while Octavius and Antony circle them, repeatedly drawing knives and thrusting downward. The image is visually arresting, but its meaning remains difficult to parse: Are Antony and Octavius still themselves, or have they become generalized figures of violence? Are Brutus and Cassius being protected, attacked, mourned, or processed through war’s machinery? The ambiguity may well be intentional, but the sequence risks losing the audience rather than productively disorienting it.
The production pushes even further into this expressionistic mode in its final images. As Sandy suggested in our conversation, the actors’ bodies crawl down the steps and gradually bind together into a single form, an image meant to suggest the accumulation of death. In theory, the idea is powerful: war reduces human beings to masses of wounded and anonymous flesh. Yet in practice, with only four actors onstage, the image struggles to achieve the scale it seems to reach for. Rather than reading immediately as a battlefield heap of bodies, the arrangement feels visually unclear. The idea behind the image is strong, but the execution does not fully communicate it with enough clarity.
That tension between conceptual ambition and theatrical legibility ultimately defines much of the production. Its strongest moments are not necessarily the most abstract, but the ones in which symbolism remains grounded in a sharply readable political argument. Interestingly, even though the title foregrounds Caesar, he is barely onstage. The production is not ultimately about Caesar as an individual so much as about the wider world organized around his power. Instead, as Sandy suggested, the production shifts attention away from the “singular, commanding figure everyone knows” and toward a group of people that dictates power around the world. It then explores how the people who surround power respond to that: do they justify it, resist it, or are seduced by it and attempt to destroy it. Seen in that light, the central tragedy lies less in Caesar’s dictatorship than in the choices Brutus and Cassius make in response to his action. Their assassination is driven by the belief that killing one dictator will restore political order, yet the production pointedly asks whether such an act solves anything at all.
Rather than offering a simple allegory in which Caesar stands in for a contemporary strongman and Brutus and Cassius emerge as heroic defenders of democracy, “Caesar” presents a much bleaker vision. It suggests a world in which power has already been corrupted and democratic faith has already begun to erode. The deeper question, then, is not only whether one man can possess too much power, but what happens when those who oppose that power begin to reproduce the logic of force in the name of saving democracy. And beyond that, the production asks what ordinary people are left to do when leadership has become untrustworthy, institutions no longer inspire confidence, and resistance itself starts to resemble the structures it seeks to defeat.
