As I watch I am just going to write my thoughts because I don’t know how formal this has to be…
The acting is so good! You can really tell that they all have a passion for drama, even is they don’t plan to pursue acting for a career. Erin was great!
The setting of Rome has transformed into the modern city. Maybe in an office…Not quite sure. Caesar is a wealthy business man, maybe a CEO.
Brutus is of second influence to Caesar, like in the original story. A WOMAN plays Playus ( or whatever her name is) who is dominate and forceful over Brutus. This is interesting because I notice this a lot in this play. Women have really influencial and powerful roles. In the day of Shakespere, women were rarely of importance.
As for the set up of the stage, it is very plain. There are no props…even the costumes are not very elaborate. The back drop is simply a blue wall with the word “Rome” written in red. I guess I expected a little more visual appeal, but perhaps Matt was trying to make the audience focus only on the acting and the hidden undertones of the script.
This is cool because Matt is taking a typical story and twisting it to provoke a new message and new thoughts. He is challenging typical gender roles. This is similar to what we are doing with our fairy tales.
Cashus is played as a girl and she plans to seduce Caesar in the plot to kill him. This is crazy to see how women are being portrayed as forceful and scheming instead of dainty and helpless.
One thing that is hard is that I can’t really understand what they are saying a lot. The acoustics of the room aren’t really that great so I don’t really know what’s going on. This is also because I can’t remember that much from when I read Caesar junior year.
Later Brutus takes more authority later in the play and starts to take charge of the ploys to kill Caesar…maybe because earlier he was empowered by Cashus, a women.
Erin also played Poshia who was Brutus’s wife. She is so bold and she doesn’t stand for being “just a wife,” being stepped over and taken advantage of. She stands up to Brutus, again, something I feel that would have been uncommon in the time the original was written.
It is really interesting the way this play was preformed and written. It wasn’t really what I was expecting. Its simple preformence and creative undertones challenged me to think outside of the norm of what I already knew of Caesar….not that I knew very much to begin with. I struggle to truly understand all the characters and their motives, but in general, I think I got a descent understanding of the plot. it would have been cool if in the program, each character had the actor’s picture and a bio of who the character is in the original Shakespere play. Maybe then I would have understood that better. Overall, it was cute, but it would have been more fun if I would have gone with a friend. 
