An adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar
by Tea Alagic and Kristina Mendicino
Directed by Tea Alagic

Featuring: Joe Tapper, Alec Beard, Brad Love, Gilbert Owuor, Charles Semine, Ryan Quinn, Kristen Connolly

About the play

The world of the play is the world of dreams and memories; a kind of purgatory in which everything that happens has already happened. It begins with Brutus on the edge of death, looking backward at the events that led him there-thus Julius Caesar becomes Marcus Brutus.

The piece explores choral rhythms, where the sound of the collective voice gives life to the images of the actor. It asks what we know about collective voices and choral expression-an ancient form that now feels more distant than Caesar’s Rome. In this way, the work, like Brutus’s memory world, takes on a distorted shape, gesturing toward primal and subconscious depths.

To estrange language and emphasize choral voices, portions of the piece draw from Latin texts, including Cicero’s speeches to the Roman Senate and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Shakespeare’s verse is treated as a given—a gift—circulated throughout the performance. The language becomes a shared pool that characters enter with varying degrees of control.

Ultimately, the piece forms a tightening net, closing in with increasing force upon the inevitable death prescribed by history, Shakespeare, and Brutus himself for the most famous assassin of Julius Caesar: Marcus Brutus.