[In the following review of Karin Coonrod's 2003 Theatre for a New Audience production of Julius Caesar, Weber contends that this production's contemporary American setting and anti-conservative political agenda obscured rather than broadened the drama's underlying character conflicts.]

Like a lot of intelligent people, Shakespeare was amazed at the paradox of political speech—that it is demonstrably misleading, and that people believe it anyway. This is the bizarre quirk of human nature that Julius Caesar deals with especially. And because politics is never without purveyors of egregious, self-serving lies, the play is perpetually relevant. Though it doesn't have the psychological depth of Hamlet and doesn't achieve or even aim for the grievous sadness of King Lear, it can really make you outraged.

Outrage appears to be very much on the mind of the director Karin Coonrod, whose Julius Caesar opened Sunday at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Without making it explicit, the show reads as a protest against the Republican oligarchy in Washington.

From the opening scenes in this modern-dress production, the director uses the costuming and manner of her actors to evoke the contemporary American nexus of conservative political power among the government, the military and the corporate elite. Until they change to military khakis in the bellicose aftermath of Caesar's funeral, the senators are all in charcoal suits with crisp white shirts and sharp haircuts. And Ms. Coonrod has encouraged a weaselly aspect from the performers, led by an oily Daniel Oreskes as Cassius, and by Simeon Moore, who plays Casca as a self-righteous but inconsequential know-it-all.

It's an approach that attenuates the grand debate over the future of Rome, making the usurping senators seem like gossipmongers in the halls of Enron or lackeys in a Karl Rove strategy session. From the outset, this is a conspiracy more venal than noble. And it works very well at first.

There is something sly and wicked to the scenes leading up to the assassination. Ultimately, however, the diminishment of the characters for partisan purposes doesn't serve the play, and Ms. Coonrod's production very quickly descends into bombastic melodrama.

This is mostly because the genuine conflicts within Cassius, Brutus (Thomas M. Hammond), Marc Antony (Graham Winton) and Caesar himself (Earl Hindman) are explicitly spelled out by Shakespeare, and their true motives are so thoroughly implied as to be evident. The play has become the standard introduction to Shakespearean tragedy because these guys are so openly full of baloney that even a junior high school student can't fail to recognize their hypocrisy and hunger for power.

The egos of these men are so bloated, their rhetoric so self-justifying, that there is something nearly comic about Julius Caesar. Even the most successful renderings of the play don't always avoid titters in the audience during Antony's funeral oration as he archly asserts Brutus's honor.

Here, the Romans are nearly stooges, and comedy almost prevails. As Cassius lavishes praise on Brutus to win him over to the conspiracy, you can't believe that a man ostensibly thoughtful and shrewd would buy such ingratiating nonsense for an instant. When Decius Brutus (Michael Rogers) reinterprets Calpurnia's awful dream, explaining to Caesar that the Romans washing their hands in his blood does not portend his death but represents his nourishment of the citizens, the ploy is transparent.

Ms. Coonrod has larded on the theatrical effects, evidently as counterweights. She has always had an affinity for stark bravado and ordinarily brings a keen sense of proportion to her work, but this time she has miscalibrated her thunder. Staging the play on a set consisting largely of cement-gray dividers, she uses a phalanx of headlights that intermittently emit blasts of blinding glare from the dark recesses of the stage. Fiercely percussive blasts of industrial-sounding recorded music accentuate the play's many harbingers of doom. The effect is oppressive and heavy-handed.

And though the cast handles Shakespearean English with great clarity and confidence—Mr. Winton is the most weightily cagey of the principals, doing especially well with the eloquent manipulations of Antony's funeral oration—the show ends up almost as an unintended parody of the grandiosity its text holds suspect. Mr. Hindman's Caesar is especially blustery and foolish, almost impossible to believe as a credible icon, much less as a terrifying ghost.

And though Mr. Hammond, a lithe actor with a trim beard (he looks considerably more lean and hungry than the burly Mr. Oreskes), is suitably tormented by his decision to help murder Caesar, he never exhibits the gravitas of “the noblest Roman of them all.” He's Harvey L. Pitt or Trent Lott, easily sacrificed or shunted aside. In the end you may find yourself more impatient than moved during his death scene.