Suellen Fitzsimmons David Whalen as Mark Antony, left, and Joshua Elijah Reese as Octavius, arm raised, with others over the body of Allen Gilmore as Brutus.

By Christopher Rawson
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Now for another installment of men behaving badly -- killing each other over abstract ideals and concrete greed.

Among them, this Caesar doth indeed bestride the narrow world like a colossus, looming some dozen feet high when his projected ghost appears before the battle at Philippi, staring down balefully at Brutus. Suddenly that good and honorable man seems a lot littler in his self-righteous rectitude.

	Suellen Fitzsimmons Allen Gilmore (Brutus), Larry John Meyers (ghost of Julius Caesar), and Joe McGranaghan (Varrus) in "Julius Caesar." Click photo for larger image. 'Julius Caesar' Where: Pittsburgh Irish and Classical Theatre at Stephen Foster Memorial, Oakland. When: Through April 28; Wed.-Sat. 8 p.m.; April 21, 28 at 2 p.m. Tickets: $29-$45; 412-394-3353.

Earlier, too, Caesar's projected images loom over the crowd of assassins in the Capitol, an emblem of greatness beset by gnats. Not that this makes a case for great leader fascism, because all the while the human Caesar, pudgy, obdurate and too self-righteous himself, is right before us, failing to measure up to the image of greatness echoing down the corridors of history.

And of theater.

After all, here we are at "Julius Caesar," watching him die once again ("how many ages hence shall this our lofty scene be acted over," says the prescient Cassius). And just as Caesar and all these conspirators and counter-conspirators seem smaller in person than their legendary images, so Shakespeare's play can seem smaller than our memories of the heroic passages we learned in high school.

I don't mean that the play doesn't measure up, but that the strength of this Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theater production, as impressive and sometimes electric as it is, often resides in its smaller human moments -- two men fighting through cross-purposes to memories of friendship or a slave devastated by his sudden freedom.

But grand is grand. Iosef Yusupov's set is Colosseum-like, a flat curve of stacked columns and arches, three-dimensional on one side, less so on the other, alive under Christopher Popowich's lights like a Giorgio de Chirico painting drenched in bright colors and also shot through with fascist shadows. The starlight is lovely.

Buzz Miller's projections loom impressively large, and Elizabeth Atkinson's sound includes varied music, often near-eastern or Greek.

A cast of 20, many spilling out into the audience, creates a pretty good sense of that Roman mob and later gives a better than sword-and-buckler account of itself in the battle scenes. There are even enough to leave a couple of bodies lying about.

Igor Roussanoff's costumes are modern to start, with the assassination scene played in stylized togas over contemporary tuxedos (they wear tuxedos to the Senate?). Turned to warriors (back then, politicians had to make their schemes good on the battlefield), they wear antique breastplates over olive drab camouflage, and the swords that seemed silly earlier now play a more functional role.

Director Andrew Paul stages the assassination as ritual alternating with scurrying confusion. Mark Antony's oration is brilliant, sucking all in, and the intermission comes right after the fabulous image of the poet murdered on the mob's whim. The play resumes in a warrior key. All along we hear bits of the famous words afresh. Generally the verse is spoken well, with only patches of dogtrot iambic.

Larry John Meyers' Caesar well captures the erratic human within the eternal image of Caesar, Kaiser, Czar and Caliph. David Whalen's Antony starts out a golden frat boy, but he's clearly no fool, and you catch glimpses of the golden ruin he becomes in "Antony and Cleopatra."

Richard McMillan plays Cassius at full bent as seriously neurotic, driven by passions he doesn't understand, including perhaps his love for Brutus. Martin Giles' Casca is as irascible as one would expect, and Joshua Reese's Octavius gives promise of imperial competence to come.

Allen Gilmore's Brutus starts slow, with little sizzle, leaving himself space to grow into his drama. This priggish good man, admirable in so many ways, is infuriatingly self-assured, an amateur who thinks he's a pro and doesn't notice that almost all his decisions are wrong.

He's not the only one. These conspirators are as incompetent as if they'd planned a war without any real idea about how to carry it through, feeling that to topple a dictator is enough. That's a thought to suggest you don't have to wait until the same lead actors play the Bush administration in "Stuff Happens" to find application to the issues of empire that beset us today.