Antony & Cleopatra

June 29 - July 2, 2006 
July 5, 7, 9, 2006 
Free admission

This 20th anniversary season offers me a rare opportunity to revisit the Roman Empire.  Artistic Director Cindy Phaneuf first brought me to Nebraska Shakespeare in 1997 to direct Julius Caesar.  Antony and Cleopatra begins a few years after Julius Caesar’s death, and tells the story of a remarkable romance between leaders of two very different cultures.


Shakespeare dramatizes the birth of the Roman Empire.  After Caesar’s death, a triumvirate was formed to lead the republic of Rome. 
Octavius, Caesar’s heir, Lepidus, a senator from a powerful Roman family, and the military hero Marc Antony, each ruled a third of the lands that Rome controlled, including the countries of Egypt and Greece. When the play ends, Octavius Caesar (later called Augustus
Caesar) becomes Rome’s first emperor. The general facts and many of the characters are historical, the timeframe of ten years is condensed, the rich characterizations are Shakespeare’s.  As with all of Shakespeare’s histories and many of the tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra twists the personal and the political around each other. This is a play where private longings, grief, grudges, weaknesses, and passions are paraded nakedly.  There are few private moments.  The tempest of Antony and Cleopatra’s personal lives is witnessed by all.


Antony desperately needs to be the center of his political/military/male world, but he is plagued by weariness, a sense of life passing him by, that he is past his prime and past his effectiveness. He looks back on the whole of his life and finds it hollow.  He needs to escape, to find a grand passion.  He finds it in Cleopatra. He deserts his wife, Fulvia, and later, Octavia, in Rome, quarrels with Octavius Caesar, and alienates his friends and supporters.  He believes that love for Cleopatra will sustain him in the face of anything.  Cleopatra’s desperation matches Antony’s.  She’s not a young girl anymore and she no longer dominates the known world. 


What’s left of Egypt is at the mercy of Rome.  She invests heavily in their love believing that it will lead toward immortality.  Their relationship has more to do with passionate obsession than affection. 


This consumes them, and they are bound to each other for eternity.  We admire them even if we find them willful or absurd, and we identify with their ultimate humanness.


Antony and Cleopatra is a fast moving play, dominated by the rhythm of short scenes, moving forward inexorably.  There is a unique character to the language in this play; there is an elaborate poetic flair to the conversations involving syntax, rhythms, images, and metaphors that separates it from other Shakespeare plays.  It is as if the characters and story were so heroic and momentous that they needed a language all their own.  Humor born of self-knowledge, wit, and irony is surprisingly present.  There is a constant unexpected mercurial shifting of mood throughout; hence, Cleopatra’s “infinite variety.”

If there is a moral to this epic tale, perhaps it is that you can’t escape from the person you are even if that is other than the person you wish to be; and you can’t escape that knowledge for long.  The price of passion can be dishonor, disillusionment, even death, and no one is exempt from it, not the mightiest, the richest or the most wise.
 

Leaders are not alone within their spheres, their actions have ramifications beyond their view, and, ultimately, they are responsible to the times and the communities they live in.
                            D. Scott Glasser