But for all its dreamy, sometimes alluring ideas and pageantry, this neurasthenic Julius Caesar fails to engage. The characters speak more often to the æther or the auditorium than to each other. Sometimes this works, as when Brutus and Cassius, facing front, hands in pockets, test the waters of each other’s thoughts about solving the Caesar problem before it kills the Roman republic. But by the time Cassius has had a similarly furtive and distant exchange with Casca, you’re ready for some contact. And though Nauzyciel is respectful of the Bard’s words and the speeches are clearly spoken, the characters’ actions often run counter to the sense of what they’re saying. Things briefly come alive for the contest of oratory at Caesar’s funeral, though The Wire actor Jim True-Frost’s Brutus is more businesslike than eloquent in his embrace of Caesar save for his “ambition.” James Waterston’s wily Antony is more compelling, grabbing a convenient boom mike to amplify the word “mutiny” in his famed, rabble-rousing eulogy.
The actors appear to be following director’s orders, which are to present the play in a manner at once surreptitious and presentational. ART stalwart Thomas Derrah, an arrogant Caesar, is the most adept at marrying characterization with stylization. And Mark L. Montgomery makes a mercurial, nervous Cassius. But True-Frost never comes to life as the play’s focus, honorable assassin Brutus. Here the noblest Roman of them all just seems depressed.
A different kind of backstabbing is on view in The Scene (at Lyric Stage Company of Boston through March 15). Playwright and successful television writer Theresa Rebeck’s comedy of bad manners debuted at the 2006 Humana Festival of New American Plays and was produced Off Broadway last year. A sort of morality play set in Manhattan but concerned with a brand of callowness whose heart is Hollywood, the piece is sharply written if not quite believable. And it has something to say about the battering, corrupting force of failure endured in the glare of success. But at the Lyric, under the baton on Scott Edmiston, it’s getting a more gleaming and substantive New England premiere than it arguably deserves.
Rebeck, the author of Bad Dates and Mauritius, has described the play as “a perverse retelling of Of Human Bondage,” with a sexy arriviste from Ohio subbing for the calculating young waitress who turns the protagonist’s head in Somerset Maugham’s novel. Here the anti-hero is Charlie, a middle-aged, out-of-work actor whose clubfoot is his stalled career. He is supported financially by his tightly wound wife, Stella, who loathes her job booking guests for a television talk show, and emotionally by a tiptoeing best friend named Lewis, who does who-knows-what in career-obsessed Manhattan. Charlie and Lewis, attending a party at some rich person’s penthouse, come across femme fatale Clea, who has recently blown in from the Midwest with a suitcase full of minuscule black garments, an airhead’s vocabulary and syntax, a mind as quixotic as it is empty, and a freewheeling sexual agenda that does not preclude an eye on the prize. Envying the egoistic and financial rewards of success even as he derides the shallow culture that bestows them, Charlie does not perceive himself to have much. And in a downward spiral of self-loathing, he throws it all away.
