"GIULIO CESARE," Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio at the Museum of Contemporary Art Theatre
BY LUCIA MAURO
After viewing the description-defying "Giulio Cesare," a multisensory surgical dissection of Shakespeare’s "Julius Caesar" by the Italy-based Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, audiences will certainly be moved to engage in endless discussions on the piece’s stomach-churning symbolism. They also might feel the urge to blow their brains out. By that, I don’t mean this iconoclastic, circus sideshow-like troupe – headed by Romeo Castellucci – literally sparks violent suicidal urges. It’s just that spending over two hours gazing at the guts and bones of humanity, more prominently displayed in the maddeningly agonized second act, made be feel utterly demoralized.
And it’s my belief that’s exactly what Castellucci set out to achieve – to make the audience feel as unsettled as the citizens of the impending Fall of the Roman Empire. If that was Castellucci’s goal, he succeeded. But at what emotional cost?
The 21-year-old performance collective of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio actually created "Giulio Cesare" in 1997. The company is making its Chicago debut with a performance (in Italian with projected English supertitles) of this blunt image- and sound-based examination of misguided power at the Museum of Contemporary Art Theatre through Nov. 10. The company is also participating in a month-long residency at the MCA, which includes film screenings and the debut of a new work, "Laboratory," on Nov. 23.
As much as I ultimately found "Giulio Cesare" repulsive in a grandiose and pretentious sort of way, the first act took hold of my entire being. Castellucci is certainly not interested in presenting the multimedia performance-art version of "Julius Caesar." Instead, he gets inside the essence of the play’s central themes of ambition, fickleness of the masses and the fact that absolute power corrupts absolutely. The downfall of civilization is at the core of this theatrical nightmare. And Castellucci goes to extremes to invert the corroded underbelly of a society headed for annihilation.
He is known – very much like Italian filmmakers Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini – to employ actors with abnormal physiques. Here an obese man, an anorexic woman, an elderly man with what appears to be a bone disorder and a speaker with a tracheotomy enact a deliberately disturbing oration on the power and failure of persuasion. The show dares to open with an actor shoving an endoscope down his throat and speaking while his vibrating larynx is projected behind him. How much deeper can one get inside the words?
Interestingly, while it seems to be wildly experimental, this "Giulio Cesare" is perhaps the most traditional I’ve seen – in terms of the painstaking attention paid to capturing an authentic and decidedly non-romanticized Roman aura, right down to the faint musty smell of damp terra cotta. Even some of the figures look like casts of the lava-encrusted corpses in Pompeii.
Castellucci also visually parallels both J.C.’s – Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ – via a floating neon cross and chants, as well as one strange recreation of Mary Magdalene wiping Caesar’s/Christ’s feet with her hair. An image of old dusty shoes piled high on stage is meant to represent the plebians, but it also sparks devastating images of the Holocaust. Meanwhile, we are assaulted by the dull whir of ambient sounds – a train roaring, dogs yelping, children laughing, women screaming. The distorted and chronic shapes and sounds slowly prove how history continues to repeat itself.
But Castellucci also gets hemmed in by his own bizarre stage pictures. A real horse is escorted on the stage, and an actor paints strange letters on the visibly perturbed animal – to what end? Later, a horse’s skeleton is wheeled in during the apocalyptic second act, which is shrouded in sooty and silvery industrial detritus. But the images are both overwrought and pointless. In other parts, lightbulbs sway and explode; Brutus speaks after sucking in helium; a stuffed cat spins its head "Exorcist"-like; and one gets the sense that everything (including text and spoken language) are getting stripped bare.
In fact, Castellucci picks off the flesh of "Julius Caesar’s" historic relevance and leaves us with the bones of futility. At the same time, he sets us awhirl in the natural disorders of the Ides of March – a feeling akin to the graves being thrown open and women shrieking in the streets the moment Christ died on the cross.
But "Giulio Cesare," featuring the anorexic alter egos of Brutus and Cassius in Act Two to no doubt illustrate their fragility, crumbles into a grotesque stasis. The relentless sounds of hammering and wailing made me feel like someone was driving a railroad spike into my head, and all I wanted to do was escape this nerve-shattering theatrical hell. So, in the end, I felt that Castellucci’s aim of making audiences truly feel the horror and discomfort of societal decay also will drive them out of the theater in droves.•
Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s production of "Giulio Cesare" (for mature audiences only) runs through November 10 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Theatre, 220 E. Chicago Ave. Tickets: $17-$22. Call 312-397-4010 or log onto www.mcachicago.org.
