Between November 15th and December 17th, 2017, the Actor’s Shakespeare Project is running an all-female production of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. Turning the original tragedy on its head, the director, Bryn Boice imagined the same old Roman story but in “an alternate universe Rome,” by changing every male pronoun to female ones, every “brother,” to “sister,” and every “man,” to “woman,”. Though this production carries not only the weight that a usual genderbent production carries, additional significance has been placed on it due to its timely show dates: coinciding with the overwhelming number of declarations of sexual assault against movie producers and stars, such as Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey, and politicians, including Al Franken and Roy Moore, along with the start of the #MeToo Project. And while there was something extremely moving about a group of strong females, all different ages, races, and sizes, chanting the altered line “This was a woman,” at a time like this, …show more content…
And while I hate to admit it, I do believe it was caused by the genderbend. For me, genderbending a story like Julius Caesar, one of coup d’etats and ever-conflicting power dynamics, is like gender-bending Lord of the Flies by William Golding. In a story that seems to feed off of male competition and, arguably, testosterone, there seems to be something lost when the males become females, brothers become sisters. From what I have experienced in my life, women have never given me a reason to believe that when faced with the problem of being stuck on an island, there would be a body count. This could be attributed to the fact that either I do not think women would act in the same way when presented with the challenge the men in the story face, or maybe they would but there has never been anything prevalent in my life to make me believe this, and this play did not convince me