Corporate sponsors have pulled funding amid controversy over an assassination scene – but the play argues against violence, says Stephen Greenblatt

When a blond Julius Caesar bounded on stage this weekend with a red tie and a svelte wife with a Slovenian accent, the New York audience laughed.

They laughed at Caesar’s punchy rhetoric and big hand gestures and susceptibility to flattery. They giggled at Calpurnia’s mincing gait and slinky, Melania-inspired wardrobe, and at Octavius Caesar, a Jared Kushner-like nerd wearing a bulletproof vest over his blue blazer.

They shouted with glee when one of Caesar’s opponents declared, exasperated, that ordinary Romans loved him so much they would forgive him “if Caesar had stabbed their mothers on Fifth Avenue”.

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But when Caesar’s enemies took out their knives and killed the Trump-like leader on the senate floor, no one was laughing.

For a moment, there was absolute silence in the outdoor theater of nearly 2,000 people. The conspirators onstage themselves seemed overcome. One of the assassins tried to shout a triumphant slogan, “Liberty!” or “Justice!”, but the words came out flat, drained of any meaning. Blood was on Caesar’s shirt, knife gashes in his blazer, blood pooling on the floor.

All the rhetoric about Caesar’s ambition, the danger he had posed to the republic, suddenly seemed worthless. There was only the horror of violence, the shock of it, even to the men and women who had plotted it and carried it out.

On Sunday, two of the Public Theater’s corporate sponsors, Bank of America and Delta Airlines, announced they were pulling their financial support for the production over the depiction of Trump-as-Caesar being assassinated.

Fox News had reported on Sunday: “NYC Play Appears to Depict Assassination of Trump”, and suggested that one giveaway that the politician being killed was Trump was that he was “brutally stabbed to death by women and minorities”.

The article quoted a commentator outraged that the production, he believed, was being partially funded by taxpayer dollars. He argued: “Is this not a responsibility for the public to say, ‘If you can use our dollars to depict the assassination of the president, we’re not going to stand for that?’”

The original Fox News article did not note until the very end of the story that the play in question was not a controversial new anti-Trump work but Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a play first performed around 1599.

The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, shared the Fox News story on Twitter Sunday, with the comment: “I wonder how much of this ‘art’ is funded by taxpayers? Serious question, when does ‘art’ become political speech, and does that change things?”

The National Endowment for the Arts, a federal funding agency whose budget Trump has vowed to slash, greets visitors to its homepage with the message: “No taxpayer dollars support Shakespeare in the Park’s production of Julius Caesar.”

Conservative outrage had also been stoked over Trump-as-Caesar by an article about the production on Breitbart, the far rightwing conservative site once run by the close Trump adviser Steve Bannon, which quoted a woman who had seen the play who called it “shocking and distasteful”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tina Benko, left, portrays Caesar’s wife, Calpurnia, and Gregg Henry, center left, plays Julius Caesar during a dress rehearsal. Photograph: Joan Marcus/AP

Shakespeare in the Park productions at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, which was built in 1962, are a longstanding New York tradition – and most of the tickets to each show are completely free to the public. Long lines of hundreds of people form in front of the theater starting at 6am on summer mornings, with New Yorkers and tourists camped next to each other on blankets and lawn chairs, waiting six hours for a maximum of two free tickets each to plays that feature prominent directors and star-studded casts of film and TV stars.

Corporate sponsorship, as the theater announces before many productions, helps keep the tickets free for the public. But at least two of the corporate sponsors have backed away from their commitment over the choice of such current political themes in a 400-year-old play – something that stagings of Julius Caesar have done over and over and over again.

“The Public Theater chose to present Julius Caesar in a way that was intended to provoke and offend. Had this intention been made known to us, we would have decided not to sponsor it,” a Bank of America spokeswoman, Susan Atran, wrote in a statement explaining its decision to “withdraw funding for this production”, though not from the Public Theater more broadly.

Bank of America has been a major sponsor of Shakespeare in the Park for 11 years, and is featured prominently in the program and in a pre-show message of thanks.

In a statement, Delta called the staging “graphic” and said the production “does not reflect Delta Airlines’ values”. The play’s “artistic and creative direction crossed the line on the standards of good taste”, a spokeswoman, Elizabeth Wolf, wrote. She confirmed Delta was ending its sponsorship of the Public Theater entirely.

Bank of America did not respond to questions about whether the executives who made the decision to pull funding had actually seen the production.

Wolf wrote: “Delta saw the play,” though she did not clarify in what form the airline was present in the theater.

For anyone who has seen the Public’s production – or read Julius Caesar – the message is not particularly ambiguous. Julius Caesar is not a pro-assassination play.

“Our production of Julius Caesar in no way advocates violence towards anyone,” a Public Theater spokeswoman said in a statement. “Shakespeare’s play, and our production, make the opposite point: those who attempt to defend democracy by undemocratic means pay a terrible price and destroy the very thing they are fighting to save.

“We stand completely behind our production,” the theater’s statement noted, adding that heated discussion and debate “is exactly the goal of our civically-engaged theater; this discourse is the basis of a healthy democracy”.

Stephen Greenblatt, a leading Shakespeare scholar at Harvard University, said: “What’s kind of amusing, in a slightly grim way, about this is to have Julius Caesar of all things suddenly the point at which the right can no longer endure free expression, which they’ve been hollering for ... Every time they send out a crazy provocateur on campus, they go bonkers if there are protests.”

The point of the play, Greenblatt said, is that it can be dangerous to get what you think you want – and that the assassination of a hated leader “could bring an end to the very republic you’re trying to save”.

“It’s weird to have that, then, be the object of this kind of hysteria,” he said.



A New York Times theater critic wrote in a favorable review over the weekend: “This Julius Caesar is a deeply democratic offering, befitting both the Public and the public – and the times ... If in achieving that goal, it flirts a little with the violent impulses it otherwise hopes to contain, and risks arousing pro-Trump backlash, that’s unfortunate but forgivable.”

But the subtlety of the play’s message has been entirely lost in the controversy.

Greenblatt, the Shakespeare scholar, said the kind of outrage this production was prompting was reminiscent of the way that Shakespeare plays had been used in Eastern Europe under communism, or in the Middle East, to stage implicitly political messages under regimes that suppressed political messages.



Outside the Delacorte Theater in Central Park on Monday morning, a mother and daughter visiting from Colorado called the decision to cut funding “shocking” and “so sad”.



“It’s the failure of the school systems to educate people,” said Jane Apostol, 52, a former New Yorker. “I wonder how old the people are who made the decision.”

Under Trump’s presidency, her family is donating more to public radio and public television news, even though they don’t have a lot of money to give.

“This play was written hundreds of years ago,” Apostol’s 14-year-old daughter, Zuri Rose, said.



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George Brunner, sitting in a lawn chair outside the theater, said he had been coming to Shakespeare in the Park since the 1970s, before the show had corporate sponsors.

The 73-year-old, an actor in his youth and a middle school English teacher in New York for 28 years, said: “If the banks and the airlines think that the administration will punish them, they will withdraw their support. Otherwise they will be generous patrons of the arts,” Brunner said. “We live in a bullshit world.

“If you want to promote the arts and you believe in the freedom of expression, then you don’t withdraw your support.”

The prominent New York theater artist Taylor Mac also weighed in on the controversy: “I don’t plan on flying Delta again, I’m happy I no longer bank with Bank of America, and I look forward to making a donation to the Public Theater in hopes it will help them continue to ask questions in bold ways.”