Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
along with Pella Shakespeare Company performing
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
June 14 (in Pella) &
June 19-22 & 27-29, 2008 (in DSM)
sponsored by:
Shakespeare in the Park returns to Des Moines! All performances are free and should it rain, we’ve set up rain locations (location updates will be posted here and through our email list no later than 3 hours prior to performances). Join us for these fantastic classics from the bard.
About the plays:
Julius Caesar: When CHANGE opened the poll last fall for our audience to choose this year’s Shakespeare production - we found it a welcome coincidence that during this year’s Presidential Election, the people chose Julius Caesar. While Julius Caesar is one of the most often studied and quoted of Shakespeare’s plays, it is rarely performed. The play follows a group of idealists and revolutionaries, hoping to change the world they live in, and improvising wildly as their plans unravel. Shakespeare’s Rome is as much a dreamscape as it is a political arena, its streets and battlefields full of dreams, ghosts, and echoes of past and future worlds.
In addition, just like in the currently unfolding campaigns, language and rhetoric play a prominent part in this profoundly political play. The play is interesting in that almost everything that happens takes place off-stage and is then retold through rumor or report. This gives Julius Caesar an oddly subjective quality; so little is enacted directly in front of us that we must rely on other people’s characterization of events, and we’re never quite sure whom or what to believe. Words, not deeds, are the primary agents in the play, and they are endowed with extraordinary powers of creation, transformation, and destruction.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The play involves two sets of couples (Hermia & Lysander and Helena & Demetrius) whose romantic cross-purposes are complicated still further by their entrance into the play’s fairyland woods where the King and Queen of the Fairies (Oberon and Titania) preside and the impish folk character of Puck or Robin Goodfellow plies his trade. Bottom the weaver and his bumptious band of “rude mechanicals” stumble into the main doings when they go into the same enchanted woods to rehearse a play that is very loosely (and comically) based on the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe, their hilarious home-spun piece taking up Act V of Shakespeare’s comedy.
