Editor’s note, May 21, 2026: Roughly half a year after Donald Trump was sworn into office the first time — Lord help us, that was way back in January 2017 — the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park was already divining just how dangerous Trump’s reign would be. Joseph Papp’s legion of theater practitioners are, after all, experts on the Bard’s works, and on how his political plays reveal the myriad ways power corrupts.
Hence, the first Shakespeare in the Park performance of the Trump era went hammer and tongs at a man who began his presidency by demanding that FBI director James Comey pledge his loyalty to Trump rather than to the Constitution. Comey refused, and to this day Trump has continued attacking Comey in the courts, though, as yet, Trump is the only one of the two to be convicted of a felony. Actually, 34 of them, for “repeatedly and fraudulently falsifying business records in a scheme to conceal damaging information from American voters during the 2016 presidential election,” as Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg put it in May 2024. (Comey’s alleged seashell violation of “18 U.S. Code § 871 – Threats against President and successors to the Presidency” is still under investigation.) In the 2017 article below, writer David Cote described a pattern that continues to resonate today: No matter how powerful a corporation might be, the moguls at the top can always be counted on to cave to power whenever their bottom line is threatened. —R.C. Baker
→ This article from the archives is part of a series celebrating the Platinum Anniversary — 70 years! — of the Voice. The first issue hit the stands on October 26, 1955. ←
Blood Bath: The Public Roars in Central Park with a Controversial Beltway Version of “Julius Caesar.”
By David Cote
Originally published on June 14, 2017
In 1991, Donald Trump bought a trademark on the words Central Park and began merchandising products (lamps, furniture, glassware) under the name of that dear green space. Today he is the largest private, for-profit holder of Central Park–branded goods. It seems only fair that Trump’s most personal brand — the squinty pout, the cubist combover, the crotch-length tie — should be infringed so that a Central Park audience may laugh at him for free. Director Oskar Eustis’s Julius Caesar goes there and goes big: an op-ed caricature scrawled over Shakespeare’s durable Roman tragedy and shoved in the nation’s face. Et tu, Comé?
Although Gregg Henry does a loose impression of the Don, our lanky ex–FBI chief escapes mockery at the Delacorte; anyway, which role would he fill? Part of the fun is noting the achievement gap between historical figures and today’s headline fodder. Gaius Julius Caesar was a military legend who conquered half of Europe and Egypt, and a master prose stylist. Trump once tried to sell steaks. But both exploit pomp and rhetoric and are violently deplored by their enemies. No one mistook comedian Kathy Griffin’s severed-head stunt as policy debate, but it inflamed passions on both sides. Partly, the outcry speaks to the power mimetic representation has over our collective lizard brain; part of it is a rational desire to, as Brutus puts it, “kill him in the shell” — crush the baby tyrant before he does any more harm. (Of course, the real bloodletting was colored green: Over the weekend, Delta Air Lines, claiming a safe, nonexistent moral high ground, yanked its financial support of the Public over childish concerns about “good taste”; Bank of America shortly followed suit, denouncing this Julius Caesar, though it ultimately stopped short of terminating its relationship with the Public’s other projects.)
This slightly trimmed version runs two hours without intermission and moves along smartly on a David Rockwell set that juxtaposes vaulting neoclassical marble with construction-site barricades covered in activist posters and graffiti: America as a locus of building up and tearing down. This is a people-power Julius Caesar: Eustis has wrangled 47 extras to play Roman citizens rioting and chanting resistance slogans (“This is what democracy looks like!”) between scenes. The first half emphasizes the Comedy Central conceit: Caesar lolls in a gold-plated bathtub, puffing on a cigar, standing defiantly naked during the entrance of Brutus (Corey Stoll), Cassius (John Douglas Thompson), and the other conspirators. The murder in the capitol is thrilling in its choreography, and quite bloody; the subsequent orations play messy, almost impromptu, with Elizabeth Marvel’s Southern-demagogue Marc Antony backslapping and bribing the crowd into anti-republican fury.
Eustis doesn’t sand down the subtleties and ironies of the text to score cheap points. He follows Shakespeare’s hurtling trajectory from grand public spectacle to intimate scenes of corrupted friendships and private despair. For those who waited in line all day and would prefer to ignore the news in favor of art, no worries: The play is there, acted by a strong ensemble. Stoll renders Brutus faithfully as an unshowy, principled bureaucrat, and Thompson has crafted the most noble and righteous Cassius I’ve seen. Sure, Cheeto Caesar is a gimmick born of anger and disgust, but it’s a gimmick with teeth — and one we need in order to probe the ever-widening fault lines between showmanship and ethical statecraft.
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