Can you compare it to anyone else’s language that you’ve worked with?
I’ve worked a lot with poetry and song. I set poetry to music, so I’ve worked a lot with Yeats’s poetry and e.e. cummings and Dylan Thomas.
So you’re a musician as well?
Yeah, I’m a guitar player and singer.
Do you play in a band?
No, I don’t play out very often. I’ve had two or three one-off concerts where I’ll put a band together and do a couple of nights of music on stage. Otherwise I just play solo. I’ve been playing some open mics in town.
Where?
The Lizard Lounge. It’s close to where I live, so I pop over there on Monday nights once in a while.
Can you talk a little bit about how you’re finding your way into the characterization of Brutus?
Most of us are trained in the Stanislavski-type Method of thinking about your character’s motivations and your character’s history and making up for yourself all the details of this very real, very specific character in order to present a very lifelike impersonation. Whereas Arthur really just wants to stay with the text. [laughs.] His mantra is, “Just say the words, it’s all in the language.” And that doesn’t mean it’s without emotion or without feeling. But the whole theatrical event is sort of . . . a much more mysterious one. It’s not just a fictional story of how it starts and what city it’s in and what happens in the course of the play — it’s more a question of what happens when we put on this play, and there’s sort of an awareness of the theatrical, presentational nature of the event. If you go back and read it and don’t think about the production in togas that you saw in junior high school and look at the words that are there, a lot of strange things happen in this play.
JULIUS CAESAR | ART AT LOEB DRAMA CENTER 64 BRATTLE ST, CAMBRIDGE | FEBRUARY 9–MARCH 16 | 617.547.8300
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