Shakespeare Repertory Project, 28 February – 1 March 2025
Director: Andreas Andreou
Co-Adapters: Andreas Andreou and Abraham E.S. Rebollo-Trujillo
Scenic Designer: Anthony Robles
Costume Designer: Kristen Taylor
Lighting Designer: Qier Luo 罗绮儿
Sound Designer: Emilee Biles
Projection Designer: Wiktor Freifeld
Production Dramaturg: Abraham E.S. Rebollo-Trujillo
Technical Director: Steph Lo 盧胤沂
Fight and Intimacy Directors: Kelsey Rainwater and Michael Rossmy
Stage Manager: Jonathan Fong 馮子睿
Assistant Stage Managers: Aura Michelle and Payton Gunner
Caius Martius/Coriolanus: Amrith Jayan
Tullus Aufidius/Citizen/Senator: Max Sheldon
Volumnia/Nicanor/Citizen: Chloe Howard
Virgilia/Adrian/Citizen: Lolade Agunbiade
Cominius/Conspirator: Michael Saguto
Menenius Agrippa/Conspirator: Jahsiah Mussig
Junius Brutus/Lord: Anna Roman
Sicinius Velutus/Lord: Bella Orobaton
A world elsewhere, 491 BCE.
A young republic is beset by famine, and when the plebeians demand fair prices for imported grain, a hot-headed general argues that their recently won rights should be stripped in exchange. The arc of Shakespeare’s play deviates very little from Plutarch’s second-century CE historical account, which could be what makes it so effective as a tragedy: the events onstage are plausible—and more compelling as a result—because they have already happened, and if we accept that old adage that history repeats itself, they are constantly on the verge of happening again.
Perhaps that’s why theatre makers across the political spectrum have taken an interest in staging and adapting The Tragedy of Coriolanus. The play was, for example, staged and celebrated by French and German fascists in the 1930s who highlighted Martius’s anti-democratic sentiment as good for maintaining order in mighty Rome. Later, in the 1950s, Brecht adapted it to emphasize the plebeian grievances against the Roman state and Martius’s threats against their rights. And Ralph Fiennes’ 2011 film Coriolanus turns Martius from an anti-democratic tyrant to a guerilla fighter who can only find his place among the Volscian resistance.
Throng our large temples with the shows of peace and not our streets with war, pleads Martius to an incensed public. Martius’s appeal brings to mind calls for domestic unity and order by politicians deeply invested in waging war and sustaining neo-colonial power across the globe. The order the patricians command is one invested in casting imperial violence as hard as possible away from Rome and towards the Volsces. But violence cannot so easily be kept out of the political arena from which it springs, and imperialism is not an arrow, it’s a boomerang.
Therefore, beware of distancing yourself and your politics from the representations on this stage. To read liberal/conservative or good/bad here is to ignore the tragic flaws that drive these personalities—and the powers they uphold—to the abyss. Here is a republic, one in which race, sex, and sexuality are not barriers to power. In this world, women may wage war (often using men as proxies) or hold political office, and same sex relations barely register in the minds of a society which prizes the ability to subjugate and control, to conquer, above all.