Theater review: Julius Caesar

Shakespeare-production concept choices sometimes feel like a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey: In which historical period, nation and culture can we set a play to make it feel fresh?

At Lantern Theater Company, feudal Japan gets the random ass-poke in artistic director Charles McMahon’s staging of Julius Caesar. Admittedly, it’s a play too often clothed in bland Roman togas and sandals — not nearly so noble since the toga parties of Animal House — and one easily transplanted to another time and place, bloody politics being a staple of human history. 

If a new setting doesn’t help the audience understand the play, however, what’s the point?

Meghan Jones’ set is blandly, vaguely Japanese: dark wood, tan walls (that lighting designer Shon Causer turns different colors) and translucent sliding panels. I hoped something interesting would be revealed behind the panels besides the occasional shadowy moments. But when they finally open, all we get is another panel and, behind that, clearly visible stage lights creating the shadows. Oh, well.

Brian Strachan’s costumes are uniformly handsome, but don’t do enough to distinguish characters when actors play multiple roles — and why does Caesar’s bloodstained yellow shirt seem so cheerfully Hawaiian, especially since the stabbing scene’s uninspired blood effects look like watery Kool-Aid? The Japanese-looking costumes, particularly the distinctive headgear, sometimes seem silly, and the actors don’t live comfortably in them. Crude masks appear in one scene, then never again.

Most successful are the audio elements — Christopher Colucci’s original music, performed by the KyoDaiko Ensemble, with eerie flutes and explosions of martial drums in particular, and sound designer Mark Valenzuela’s powerful storm, with its seat-shaking thunder, work well.

The performances, however, fumble in some sort of Bermuda Triangle between Japan, Rome and Philly. Forrest McClendon shines in the too-brief title role (we all know what happens to Caesar, right?) with a graceful imperial air that underscores the senatorial conspirators’ pettiness — but then the Tony-nominated actor suffers the indignity of returning later as a soldier, a big helmet failing to hide his identity.

Others excel in moments: Joe Guzman as Cassius, he of the “lean and hungry look,” whose later attack of conscience feels real; Adam Altman as the poet Cinna (among others), mistaken by a mob for a conspirator; Bradley K. Wrenn as Caesar’s haughty but unqualified successor Octavius; Jered McLenigan as the principled Marc Antony. 

But their performances too easily devolve into mere shouting — so much so that the second act’s barrage of battle scenes and recriminations becomes painfully loud. (Avoid the front row.) 

Mary Lee Bednarek and Kittson O’Neill play wives pushed aside by both Shakespeare and McMahon, then must also serve as soldiers. The ensemble shows that the play can indeed be done with only nine actors, but not done well.

Julius Caesar ought to belong to Brutus, the most tragic conspirator, because he’s the only one acting against Caesar not out of fear and envy, but for idealistic reasons that tragically crumble. But the actor playing him, who goes by the initials U.R., sabotages the role with a peculiar vocal affectation not heard in his other local performances at the Lantern (The Island) or the Arden (Stick Fly, A Raisin in the Sun, The Piano Lesson) — a character choice, along with a punky Mohawk haircut, that renders Brutus maddeningly distracting, difficult to understand and wholly unbelievable.

Whether recognizably set in Rome, Japan or some other place and time, Julius Caesar doesn’t work when that choice isn’t clearly justified. Instead, the play becomes, as Shakespeare writes in Macbeth, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Through March 16, $30-$38, St. Stephen’s Theater, 923 Ludlow St., 215-829-0395, lanterntheater.org.