They put a Trump look-alike
on a Central Park stage
and stabbed him to death. Nightly.
In the spring of 2017, the Public Theater staged Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in Central Park with a Julius Caesar character dressed and styled to look unmistakably like Donald Trump — blond combover, ill-fitting suit, long red tie. Night after night, for the run of the show, a Trump look-alike was surrounded by senators and stabbed repeatedly to death. The Public Theater called it art. Two corporate sponsors called it something else and left.
Spring 2017. Central Park. The blond combover was not a coincidence.
The Public Theater’s annual free Shakespeare in the Park production has been a New York institution since 1962. In 2017, the company chose to mount Julius Caesar— Shakespeare’s tragedy about the assassination of Rome’s most powerful man by a group of senators who convince themselves the murder is necessary to save the republic. The title character was dressed in a blond combover wig, a long red tie, an ill-fitting dark suit, and given a wife costumed to resemble Melania Trump. He delivered his speeches with a hand-chopping gesture familiar from Trump campaign rallies. He walked with Trump’s particular waddle. There was no stated political framing in the program. There didn’t need to be.
The New York Times reviewed it on May 22, 2017, under the headline “Shakespeare in the Park’s ‘Julius Caesar’ Uses Trump as Inspiration.” The production ran through June 18. Performances were held outdoors at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. Every night, the Trump-styled Julius Caesar was surrounded by his senators, pleaded for his life, and was stabbed 23 times — the number of wounds specified in the play’s source text. It was publicly funded, free to attend, and presented as civic cultural programming.
“The production … depicts a Julius Caesar who evokes Donald Trump. Mr. Trump's supporters have found the production offensive, a view that has now been echoed by two corporate sponsors who withdrew funding.”
New York Times — June 12, 2017 · Reporting on the Public Theater production and sponsor withdrawals
Delta pulled out. Bank of America pulled out. The Public Theater said they didn’t understand Shakespeare.
On June 12, 2017, Delta Air Lines issued a statement withdrawing its sponsorship of the production. “No matter what your political stance may be,” Delta’s statement read, “the graphic staging of Julius Caesar at this summer’s Free Shakespeare in the Park does not reflect Delta’s values.” Delta had been a long-term partner of Shakespeare in the Park. Bank of America followed the same day, withdrawing its own funding and stating that the production “intended to provoke and offend.”
The Public Theater responded with a statement defending the production on artistic and historical grounds. Artistic Director Oskar Eustis argued that Shakespeare’s play, properly understood, is not a celebration of Caesar’s killers — Brutus and Cassius are ultimately destroyed by their act, and the play ends in tragedy for the assassins. “To date,” his statement read, “Julius Caesar has been performed across the world for over 400 years and has been set in contexts ranging from Mussolini’s Italy to modern-day Africa.”
— Delta Air Lines, official statement, June 12, 2017. Reported by CNN Money, The Hill, Deadline, New York Post.
The Public Theater’s literary argument was not wrong on the merits — the play does punish the conspirators and does not, in the text, celebrate Caesar’s death. What the argument omitted was simpler: the production was not presenting Mussolini’s Italy to a neutral audience processing a historical atrocity. It was presenting a Trump costume and a Trump mannerism set to an assassination script, in Central Park, in the sixth month of the Trump presidency, to audiences who gave the stab scene a standing ovation. The literary defense addressed the text. It did not address the staging.
June 16, 2017. Two people ran onto the stage.
On June 16, 2017 — two days after a gunman opened fire on Republican members of Congress at a baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia, critically wounding House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) — conservative activist Laura Loomer ran onto the stage of the Delacorte Theater during the assassination scene and shouted: “Stop the normalization of political violence against the right!” She was removed by security and arrested. Jack Posobiec, also in attendance, stood in the audience and shouted at the crowd: “You are all Goebbels!”
The Public Theater issued a statement condemning the disruption. The media covered the interruption as an assault on artistic freedom. The Scalise shooting — which occurred the day before, committed by a man whose social media history showed intense anti-Trump and pro-Bernie Sanders sentiment — received separately extensive coverage. The two events were rarely analyzed in the same editorial frame.
June 16, 2017:Laura Loomer disrupts the Public Theater’s Julius Caesar during the assassination scene. She is arrested. Jack Posobiec shouts from the audience. Both are condemned by theater and media.
The Public Theater continues the run. The production concludes June 18.
Ask the simple question. Would this have run if Caesar looked like Obama?
The Public Theater’s defense rested on the argument that Shakespeare’s Caesar has been reimagined in countless historical contexts, and that this production was no different. The argument is correct as a matter of theatrical history. It is unconvincing as applied, for one reason: the standard has never been applied in the other direction.
No major publicly funded American theater company has staged a production of Julius Caesar in which Caesar wears a Barack Obama costume and is stabbed to death nightly in front of cheering audiences. No production has costumed Caesar to resemble Bill Clinton. No artistic director has offered a press statement defending the creative choice to put a George W. Bush look-alike through a ritual public execution and called it classical tradition. The argument that this is simply what theaters do with Shakespeare requires the audience to believe that the choice to make Caesar look like the sitting president in 2017 was aesthetically unremarkable — that it could just as easily have been a Clinton Caesar or an Obama Caesar and the artistic intent would have been identical.
It could not. The choice was deliberate. The costume was deliberate. The casting of the “Calpurnia” figure in a Melania Trump wardrobe was deliberate. The standing ovations during the stabbing scene were not a response to Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter. They were a response to watching a Donald Trump simulacrum be killed on stage. The Public Theater knew that. They chose to do it anyway.
“This is exactly the right time to do this play. Shakespeare understood that the threat to democracy, the threat to the republic, comes when a would-be autocrat — like Caesar, like Trump — believes they are larger than the institutions they're serving.”
Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director, Public Theater — June 2017 · Defending the production to The New York Times
Art is a defense. It is not an exemption. Ask the asymmetry question and the defense collapses.
The Public Theater did not break any law. The production was legal. Delta Air Lines and Bank of America were not censoring anyone — they were making a business decision about what they wanted to fund. Laura Loomer’s stage disruption was an illegal trespass and she was correctly arrested. None of this is contested.
What is contested is the claim that the production was simply neutral artistic practice — that putting a Trump costume on Julius Caesar and staging his nightly assassination in front of standing-ovation crowds in Central Park, in the sixth month of a contested presidency, was no different from a historical theater company staging a period-dress production. That claim requires a kind of deliberate aesthetic amnesia: an insistence that the blond wig and the red tie were incidental choices with no particular meaning. The audience did not experience them as incidental. They experienced them as a nightly ritual execution, and they cheered for it.
The same artistic directors who defended this as a proud tradition of politically engaged Shakespeare would not greenlight a production of Julius Caesar in which the title character was costumed as Barack Obama, Michelle Obama stood at his side, and the senators drew applause as they drove in the blades. If they would, they have not said so. If someone made that production, the debate about artistic freedom would look very different — and everyone in the room knows it.
June 14, 2017: A man with documented anti-Republican political views shoots four people at a congressional baseball practice, critically wounding Steve Scalise (R-LA).
June 16, 2017: Laura Loomer disrupts the production during the stabbing scene. She is arrested. The run concludes two days later.
The question no press conference was asked: would the same Artistic Director, the same board, and the same audience have staged this production with an Obama costume? The question answers itself.