Caesar Falls Again

By * T.E. Kalem

MARCUS BRUTUS

by PAUL FOSTER

This play is enjoying its world premiere at an enterprising six-year-old regional theater, Stage/West, located in Springfield, Mass. Like several other such theaters, Stage/West tries to make room in its repertory season for new and serious drama. In recent years, some of these plays have reached New York and won critical acclaim. What is of more importance is the increasing willingness of regional theaters to trust in the receptivity of their local audiences to new works rather than continually playing it safe with revivals of classics or Broadway hits.

Playwright Paul Foster is not a newcomer to the stage. His Tom Paine (1968) enjoyed substantial popularity off-Broadway, particularly with younger audiences, thanks in part to Tom O'Horgan's flamboyant staging. In Marcus Brutus, Foster has followed Tom Stoppard's lead in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Just as R. & G. used Hamlet for its substructure, Marcus Brutus uses Julius Caesar.

Foster's switch is this: an aspiring young playwright named simply Cat (Ed Rombola) conjures up the spirits of the ancient Roman conspirators. They hover over his typewriter in his New York apartment. Cat also summons up Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, who doubles as his actress girl friend Memphis (Lea Scott). He tells them that since Brutus is a rational man and "rational men don't kill," he plans to revise their destinies so that Caesar will not be assassinated in the forum.

Gorily Slain. But Cat finds that the forces of history prove inexorable, and Caesar is gorily slain again. It might be argued that Foster has provided, though he fails to pursue, a plausible motive for Brutus' act. Brutus discovers that he is Caesar's natural son and takes his vengeance for not being designated Caesar's heir. This, of course, is a longstanding historical rumor, though no proof has ever been adduced for it. Foster's cautionary political moral is that no man of Brutus' nobility of reason would commit such an act without an overriding ideal and that such ideals can be dangerously manipulated.

Of greater theatrical interest is one specific echo from Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author--that illusion transcends reality once solidly conceived characters make the quantum jump from the playwright's imagination to the living stage. The playwright will change, wither away and die; his characters will remain changeless.

The Stage/West cast is competent without being proficient, though Rombola's Cat has a disarmingly baffled naivete and Scott's Memphis-Cleopatra is both perky and voluptuous. As of now, Marcus Brutus is more than a first draft and less than a finished drama, but certainly worth the doing as an intriguing work in progress.

* T.E. Kalem

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