On Valentine's Day, 2007, my wife and I attended Walking Shadow Theatre Company's production of Naomi Iizuka's 36 Views, a beautiful play about forged art where almost everyone lies to almost everyone else almost all the time. This year, February 14 is encompassed by Walking Shadow's run of Caligula, being advertised with the tagline "All-powerful. Flawlessly logical. Barking mad." At last, here is Valentine's Day entertainment I can get behind.
After the last issue of Whistling Shade went to press, I remembered that, in the interests of full disclosure, I'm supposed to tell you when I have connections to the theater companies whose work I'm previewing. So, in discussing How I Learned to Drive, I was supposed to tell you that, at about this time every year, I don my stoutest playwright's cap and a pair of fingerless gloves and spend nine hours in what has to be the coldest church basement in Minneapolis, writing a ten-minute play for Theatre Unbound's 24-Hour Play Project. This time, I'm supposed to tell you that John Heimbuch, Walking Shadow's co-artistic director, stage manager, and general guy what gets things done, is a friend of mine, and that David Pisa, co-artistic director, technical director, and production manager, went to high school with my wife.
There. I feel better now.
The play: Caligula, by Albert Camus
The company: Walking Shadow Theatre Company (http://walkingshadowcompany.org/)
The production: February 13 - 28, 2009 at Red Eye Theater, 15 West 14th Street, Minneapolis
Albert Camus wrote Caligula in 1938, while living in Algiers. Intending it for the small theater company he had founded there, he envisioned himself playing the title role. But then, he reports, "the war forced me to modesty, and Caligula first played in 1945 at the Théâtre-Hébertot in Paris."
In case your grasp of ancient Roman history isn't what it used to be, Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (nicknamed "Caligula" after the little military boots he wore as a child) was born in 12 CE and became the third Roman emperor in 37 CE, at the age of twenty-five. By all accounts, the first two years of his reign were peaceful, uneventful ones.
And then...something happened. No one's entirely sure what. The first-century historian and philosopher Philo claims that the extravagant lifestyle Caligula adopted upon becoming emperor led him to illness, and that illness made him a flaming nutjob.
Camus' Caligula proposes a different interpretation of events. The play opens with the death of Caligula's sister and mistress, Drusilla. Her death forces Caligula to face certain truths which, until this point, experience has not prepared him for: life, even for an emperor, is fleeting and imperfect, full of immutable divine and natural laws that humans cannot circumvent. In short, as he succinctly explains, "We die, and we are not happy." In Camus' telling, it is his attempt to grapple with the disappointments of life that turns Caligula into a flaming nutjob.
Caligula becomes obsessed with the impossible. He orders his friend Helicon to bring him the moon. If only he had the moon in his possession, he believes, even the impossible would be possible, including triumph over death and human elevation above the gods.
Caligula is also coming to believe it impossible for ordinary men truly to be free. He resolves that he will be free by adhering unwaveringly to "logic" and by trying to make the fawning patricians who constantly surround him follow the same dictates.
METELLUS: Well, there's a few things we need to discuss - some priorities, I'm sure you understand.
CALIGULA: E.g.?
METELLUS: ...the Treasury.
CALIGULA: The Treasury? Of course. The Treasury. That's the top priority.
METELLUS: Exactly, Caesar....
CALIGULA: Right. Step one. All patricians-in fact everyone in the Empire who has any money, it doesn't matter how much-shall be henceforth obliged to disinherit their children and make a new will leaving everything to the state.
METELLUS: But...Caesar...
CALIGULA: I don't think I said you could speak? Step two. As the need for cash arises, we execute people. Randomly. And we take their money....
METELLUS: Caesar, I don't think you realize-
CALIGULA: Listen carefully, moron. If the Treasury is to be priority number one, then human life becomes priority number two.
As the emperor's commitment to "logic" increases, so does his violence and depravity. Arbitrary executions; pronouncements that "famine begins tomorrow. I've decreed it"; rape of a patrician's wife while the patrician eats dinner in the next room-and yet, far more disturbing than his actions is the cold detachment underlying them.
CHEREA: We've had mad emperors before, but this one isn't like that. This one's problem is that he isn't mad enough. That's what makes him so terrifying. He knows exactly what he wants to achieve.
CASSIUS: He wants to kill us all.
CHEREA: No, that's a side issue. He's using his power to service a higher, more deadly cause. He's striking at something very deep within us. Of course, it's not the first time that a man's had absolute power in Rome, but it is the first time that it's been used to absolute effect-to negate every human value, every natural law. That's what's appalling and that's what I want to fight against. Death is a small thing, I'm prepared for it when it comes. But to see life itself being drained of its meaning, to see it rendered absurd, that is unbearable. Life must make sense.
And yet Caligula's contention is precisely that life has no meaning and no sense, and that it is absurd. He believes that this revelation, and his determination to follow it to its absurdly logical (or logically absurd) conclusion, will make him free. However, as Camus says in his preface to a 1958 collection of his plays, "[Caligula] tries...to practice a liberty that he will eventually discover not to be the right one....if his truth is to rebel against fate, his error lies in negating what binds him to mankind. One cannot destroy everything without destroying oneself....Unfaithful to mankind through fidelity to himself, Caligula accepts death because he has understood that no one can save himself all alone and that one cannot be free at the expense of others." A lesson that, sadly, we have learned and forgotten and struggled to relearn innumerable times throughout human history.
The traditional version of Caligula in English is Stuart Gilbert's translation for the 1958 collection. But for this production, Walking Shadow treads relatively new ground by using a 2003 translation by Scottish playwright David Greig. Greig's translation modernizes the language a bit (a patrician humiliated in the Gilbert version by being constantly addressed as "darling" is now called "ducky"), but the main effect is slightly lightening and straightening the dense soliloquies and speeches -which makes the message more chilling, since the language will be more immediately accessible to audiences.
Here is Gilbert's version of Caligula's Act IV speech to his concubine, Caesonia:
CALIGULA: It makes me laugh, Caesonia, when I think how for years and years all Rome carefully avoided uttering Drusilla's name. Well, all Rome was mistaken. Love isn't enough for me; I realized that then. And I realize it again today, when I look at you. To love someone means that one's willing to grow old beside that person. That sort of love is right outside my range. Drusilla old would have been far worse than Drusilla dead. Most people imagine that a man suffers because out of the blue death snatches away the woman he loves. But real suffering is less futile; it comes from the discovery that grief, too, cannot last. Even grief is vanity.
And here is Greig's rendering:
CALIGULA: It makes me laugh to think the whole of Rome's spent years trying to avoid mentioning Drusilla's name in front of me. They've been so wrong. Love isn't enough to hurt me. That's what I saw then, and I see it now with you. To love someone you have to accept that you'll grow old with them. I can't do that. Drusilla old is so much more upsetting than Drusilla dead. People think a man suffers because he loses his lover one day or another. But the real sorrow is to realize that grief doesn't last either. Even pain loses its feeling.
Some will lament the loss of the somewhat elevated language of Gilbert's version, but having traveled through the eras of human history in the Theater Machine, I've seen that the theater is the people's medium, and a play that no longer connects with the people of its time is a play that's no longer vital.
And Caligula, above all, is a play of great vitality-the vitality of blood, of violence, and of madness. Yet Camus' intention was not to shock; in his 1958 preface he insists, "I have little regard for an art that deliberately aims to shock because it is unable to convince." Caligula masterfully accomplishes both. Our hats here at the Theater Machine are off to Walking Shadow for tacking this mighty drama, and our fingers are crossed that they, too, will manage to both shock and convince.
© 2008 by Eli Effinger-Weintraub .