A man obsessed Gamm’s powerful Julius Caesar BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Julius Caesar By William Shakespeare. Directed by Judith Swift. With Jim O’Brien, Chris Byrnes, Richard Donelly, Antony Estrella, Alyn Carlson-Webster, Melissa Penick, Scott Winters, Sam Babbitt, Gary Lait Cummings, Mauro Canepa, Steve Kidd, Sean Michael McConaghy, Tom Oakes, and Mark McClure. At Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre through June 13.

Unlike Shakespeare’s other plays, Julius Caesar allows us a glimpse into the imagination of the playwright at a crucial transformational time. In 1599 he had written all but one of his history plays and was about to pen the first of his great tragedies. In this intense drama, we can see the Bard grow utterly fascinated with the inner workings of men tormented by obsession.

The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre blows the doors off their Pawtucket theater space, making as compelling an enactment of the murderous plot as anything but a fly on a Roman senate wall has any right to witness.

Some of the impact has to do with director Judith Swift convincingly placing this in a context we can relate to and scenic designer Kevin Sciotto making that vivid and visceral. These senatorial conspirators in their pin-striped blue suits come across as confidently Washingtonian, striding corridors of power that transcend location.

In a touch that could appear more gimmicky than substantial, SPQR Satellite News Network correspondents stick microphones in faces and comment on late-breaking goings-on. The set is stainless steel and glass, and slides are projected left and right to enhance ambiance — an awe-inspiring colonnade outside the Roman forum; the rolling expanse of a battlefield. When necessary, these images pull no punches. The war in Iraq is brought home not only by projecting the words "Operation Phillipi" from the battlefront, but also by actual footage of carnage that American viewers are being protected from: gnarled, charred corpses; a head partially blown away.

As the play opens, Caesar has just returned in triumph after defeating Gaius Pompey in the republic’s latest civil war. The populace has grown accustomed to accepting this sort of jockeying for power. Before the people in the street, Caesar is three times offered the crown and three times refuses the opportunity to be king. Despite the gesture of humility, those who know him grow suspicious of his ambition.

The staying power of the Gamm production comes from compelling portrayals of the three crucial men surrounding Caesar (Richard Donelly). Donelly does fine, with his short gray hair and uncanny resemblance to an image of Caesar that is projected at one point, but the title character of this play is essentially a background figure to action swirling before him.

Always easiest to appreciate is Marc Antony (Anthony Estrella), whose hands stay clean. Estrella does well delivering the rabble-rousing speech where he ostensibly has come to bury Caesar, not to praise him — with a hint of a smirk and all but a sly they-bought-it wink. Pee Wee Herman could give us goose bumps with that speech; it’s brilliant. But it is the character’s portrayal before and after that pivotal moment that works the magic. Over the bleeding body of Caesar, knowing that he will be killed by these men with daggers in their hands if he doesn’t think fast, this Marc Antony is scared. Putting on a brave front, but scared. Estrella balances that, after the conspirators have fled Rome, with a light-hearted Marc Antony holding back an urge to be flippant with his power to assign men to death with a check mark next to their names. Estrella gives us the whole, flawed man.

Brutus (Jim O’Brien) is almost as easy to appreciate, since he was the most reluctant to kill Caesar. At the end, Marc Antony declares him to be the only one whose decision was not out of envy, "the noblest Roman of them all." O’Brien has always been able to convey a man conflicted, roiling beneath the surface, and here he taps that torment to evocative effect. At most points, we not only believe what this Brutus does, we also glimpse him considering not to do so.

With all that, for me the most fascinating portrayal here is that of Cassius, the prompter of the conspiracy. Chris Byrnes gives us a Cassius who has no idea that he is a shallow man. As a physical type, Byrnes has a bit of the Wally Shawn about him, so he’s always been able to convey anti-hero, if not schlub. Here he doesn’t allow us to dismiss Cassius so easily. This aristocrat thinks very well of himself, and he gets us to share, for example, his frustration over Caesar’s condescension to him after he saved the braggart from drowning. Byrnes has developed into an accomplished actor, and this is both his most formidable and most impressive role to date.

The year after writing Julius Caesar, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. This Gamm production makes clear what so fascinated him about the subterranean give and take of the duty-troubled mind.