The Vital Role of Political Theater
Diane Paulus, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and Robert Schenkkan discuss how the Public Theater’s recent production of <em>Julius Caesar</em> fits into a grand artistic tradition.
One of the things that made the backlash to the Public Theater’s recent production of so ironic, the director Diane Paulus argues, is that the concept of protest was already built into the show. In Oskar Eustis’s modern-dress production of the Shakespeare history play, which depicts Caesar as a Trump-like figure, actors spent the first hour of the play disguised as audience members before unexpectedly jumping up from their seats to form a mob midway through., it only emphasized the points the play was trying to make about the dangers of mob mentality.
