Last night, I
saw Casey Wimpee's play The Brutes at the
New Ohio Theatre. This production by spit&vigor reimagines the rehearsals
for the famous production of Julius
Caesar presented in New York City in 1864, featuring all three of the sons
of actor Junius Booth... just months before one of them--John Wilkes--assassinated President Abraham Lincoln.
The story has
plenty of inherent drama. Edwin Booth, the most successful of the three
brothers, was preparing to take on the title role in Hamlet for 100 nights at the Winter Garden Theatre, which he
co-managed with his brother-in-law John Sleeper Clarke. The night before he was
to begin this extraordinary run of Hamlet,
he appeared for the first and only time on stage with his two brothers, Junius Jr. and John Wilkes.
Booth's production
of Julius Caesar was intended as a
benefit to raise funds for a statue of Shakespeare in Central Park. Junius
Booth Jr., the eldest, played Cassius, while Edwin played Brutus and John
Wilkes played Marc Antony. The production was also a tribute to Junius Sr., and
the playbill bore the words "FILII PATRI DIGNO DIGNIORES" which means
roughly "worthy children of a worthier father."
As The Brutes points out, this performance took
place on Evacuation Day (November 25th), the holiday marking the evacuation of
British troops from Manhattan during the American Revolution. It also fell just
after the last Thursday in November, which President Lincoln had declared a
national holiday of Thanksgiving for the second year in a row. (The holiday had
been celebrated only sporadically before then, and on various dates.)
Wimpee gives us
what is possibly the most awkward Thanksgiving dinner of all time, as the
pro-Union Edwin and Junius Jr. sit down to eat turkey and cranberry sauce with
their unabashedly pro-Southerner brother. John Wilkes Booth reportedly confided
in his sister Asia Booth Clark that he was running the drug quinine to the Confederacy
past a Union blockade. Wimpee dramatizes this conversation, giving a moment
to shine for Sara Fellini, who plays Asia, and Colt W. Keeney, who plays John
Wilkes.
Fellini also
directed the piece, and she has a chorus of "Brutes" appear first in
masks and then later with drums, beating out a violent rise in tension
throughout the play. Some of the Brutes--Herold, George, and Mary--bear names
similar to Booth's alleged co-conspirators, David Herold, George Atzerodt, and
Mary Surratt. A fourth Brute, Fontaine, bears the name of a hanged man who requested
that after his execution his skull be given to Junius Booth Sr. to use as Yorick's skull in Hamlet. (That skull
continued to be used by Edwin, and it is now in the possession of the Players Club, which that actor helped to found.)
Junius Booth Sr.
appears in The Brutes as a ghost played
by Eamon Murphy. He re-enacts scenes from Hamlet
together with Edwin, played by Adam Belvo. In addition, we get not only scenes
from Julius Caesar (which is to be
expected) but also lines from King Lear.
Edwin takes on the role of Edgar, while John Wilkes assumes the role of the
traitor, Edmund the Bastard. As characters in The Brutes observe, all of the Booth children were technically
bastards, since Junius Sr. had abandoned his first wife to run off to America
with a flower girl. (The couple claimed to be married, but weren't officially
wed until the year before the famed actor died.)
The infamous
benefit performance of Julius Caesar
did not go well, in spite of the $3,500 it raised for the statue of Shakespeare
(which still stands in Central Park). During the first scene of Act II,
audiences were distracted by a cacophony of alarm bells and fire engines. Confederate
sympathizes had set fire to various parts of the city, and the building
directly next to the theatre was ablaze. According to contemporary reports,
Edwin Booth calmed the crowd and helped to prevent hysteria. The performance
continued, and eventually the cast finished the show.
Fellini stages
the fire with the four Brutes utilizing percussion and red flashlights. It is a
haunting moment, as are the allusions to the Lincoln assassination and the
execution of the conspirators. As Wimpee's play remarks, the president's murder
did not occur on the Ides of March like Caesar's, but it did occur on the eve
of the Ides of April. That day, which was also Good Friday, Lincoln was watching the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre,
and John Wilkes Booth snuck in and shot him in the back of the head.
