Sampling the Past and Remixing References: A First Look from the Julius X Creative Team

“I fell in love with The Tragedy of Julius Caesar when I was 13,” playwright Al Letson said about his first encounter with Shakespeare’s play as a Black student in a predominantly white school in Jacksonville, Florida.

Dramaturg John “Ray” Proctor noted that Julius X “samples” from Shakespeare’s text, just as Lauryn Hill and the Fugees sampled Roberta Flack’s ballad “Killing Me Softly,” both honoring the original song and creating something new and of their own time in their recording. Shakespeare, too, sampled from the Roman historian Plutarch when creating this tragedy.

“I tell anybody who will listen that this is not Malcolm X’s story, and it is not Julius Caesar,” director Nicole Brewer said. “It’s the amalgamation of both with Letson’s poetry and remixing of sources to create something new. And so, we invite you to that place and space.”

Set design

Set designer Jonathan Dahm Robertson has created a set that represents “our kingdom of Harlem,” with the iconic brownstone and the “stoop as the regal dais,” the site where community comes together, where neighbors share news, and where conflicts are resolved.

For this design, the Folger’s Elizabethan-style theater will also have a brick facade, playing with the vertical space of the stage with period-appropriate vertical blinds, and a gilded door recalling both Islamic geometric patterns and an integration of “X” shapes.

Costumes

Costume designer Danielle Preston has pulled inspiration from clothing worn by Malcolm X and key Civil Rights figures but noted “we aren’t really interested in recreating history.”  To that end, she has mixed mid-century American fashion, the silhouettes associated with the Nation of Islam, and colors and patterns worn by Ethiopian women. She also hinted that costumes will depict the interior lives of characters, such as Brutus devolving from a sleek, polished look to over-accessorizing and appearing unkempt. “We’ll see him weighed down by the things that he’s done,” Preston explained.

Lighting, projections, and sound

Other visual and aural references that the designers plan to work into the production are just as varied and rich.

Lighting designer Porsche McGovern found inspiration in the use of layered, crisp, cool colors in the recent Amy Sherald’s American Sublime exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Projection designer Andrés Poch’s “operatic, poetic, emotional” designs hearken back to Black art-making traditions like quilt-making as well as contemporary Black artists Kehinde Wiley and the late Faith Ringgold.

Sound designer Thom J. Woodward, a self-proclaimed “PK” (preacher’s kid), is bringing together Christian and Muslim religious soundscapes, such as incorporating call and response, familiar in gospel and blues music, and the Adhan, the Islamic call to prayer. He stated: “I keep going back to Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets [a musical and poetry collective formed during the Civil Rights Movement] who are part of our oral tradition. It’s indicative of what’s possible in this world we are building from a sonic standpoint.”