The space between Julius Caesar and Malcolm X

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a play steeped in the classical canon, laden and layered with both HISTORY and performance history. Letson’s Julius X is a tale rife with much more recent collective American cultural memory, evoking images and speeches from a moment in America when people fought for the right simply to be recognized as American, and notions of equality and justice occupied the center of that that contest. Julius X is a sort of Venn diagram that allows us (the audience) to twice witness a text with which we may be familiar (Julius Caesar), with a harsh and violent moment of American history that marked a significant contest waged by Black Americans for freedom, equality, and the right to be considered American.

Letson’s text is more than simply setting, or dressing, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar with the raiment and memories of Harlem between March 1964 and February 21, 1965, the weeks and months before Malcolm X’s assassination. Contemporary theater producers and directors have been known to set Shakespeare productions in a myriad of settings ranging from the some imagined classically Shakespearean to the extreme (Hamlet on the Death Star, for instance). This often leaves the audience to discern the meaning and make connections between the text of the play and the whimsy of the directorial and production choices made to adapt a literary-text into the spectacle-text, in other words, turning the page into the stage.

Julius X is not that. Letson’s reimagining is more than Harlem, standing in for Rome, between 1964 until Malcolm X’s assassination in February of 1965. It’s a reconsideration of tensions, identity, and status at a particular moment in American history, allowing Shakespeare’s fictitious struggle for power to reverberate with an era, or a particular moment, in American history. Thus this story becomes both familiar and recognizable, but also new.

Julius X on stage at Folger Theatre

Whereas Julius Caesar may be the title character in Shakespeare’s play, most of the plot of Shakespeare’s play is not centered on the title character. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar centers on the petty jealousies and the machinations of the conspirators who would, ultimately, kill Caesar, and once Caesar is dead, almost the final third of the play incorporates a host of characters that don’t appear in the first two thirds of the play, and the ultimate slaughter and deaths of the conspirators who killed Caesar.

Similarly, Julius X, does not attempt to convey the totality of Malcolm X. Cultural collective memory distorts our memories of the man for the utility we’ve created of what he stood for. This thought touches on Letson’s reason for engaging in this project in the first place. In interviews Letson has discussed how he was not cast in three separate productions of Julius Caesar, and he wanted to be in Caesar so badly. The play spoke to him. Julius Caesar is about honor, being passed over, anger, and jealousy—he saw himself in this text, though none of the (primarily white) theater companies could see him in their productions of the play. So, he reimagined Shakespeare’s text, envisioning a similar, but different, reflection of a world in which people who looked like him could exist—and Black people could tell and be a part of epic stories of jealousy, anger, honor, and revenge. And, there were Black people who had been a part of stories—American stories—that had so many of these same elements.

But Julius X is not a biography. It is certainly not Malcolm X’s biography. The author, Letson, borrows from the life of Malcolm X and from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, creating a new narrative that exists somewhere in the cracks between American History and American identity. Thus Shakespeare, rather than being a tool to exclude (static, stagnant, and staid) becomes a mirror, a contemporary mirror, for the multicultural, multiracial, multifaceted society—that is the America in which we (Letson, us, you, and me) exist.

Thus, Julius X may look familiar to you because it might resemble a Julius Caesar that you saw once upon a time. It might also look familiar because you read the Alex Haley Malcolm X biography; or because you may remember the Nightline reporting of his assassination; or because you had an African American History course, where the Civil Rights movement was discussed for a week or two. But Letson’s reimagining of Julius X, nee Julius Caesar, is neither—and both. This is a fusion of history and literature, a creation that incorporates Black American identity with Shakespeare and American history. It contains all those disparate identities that have never comfortably fit in the same room, and this reimagining creates something new.

About the author

John “Ray” Proctor, Dramaturg, and Voice and Text Coach, Julius X. Additional Folger Theatre credits: Six Othellos (The Reading Room Festival, 2024). Associate Professor of Theatre, Tulane University. Acting: Organic Theater Company: Romeo and Juliet; Arizona Repertory Theatre: The Merchant of Venice; Greenbrier Valley Theatre: Othello; Southern Rep Theatre: Airline Highway, Father Come Home from the Wars. Director: Summer Lyric Theatre at Tulane University: Into the Woods; Crescent City Stage: Pantomime; Tulane University: Trouble in Mind. Publications: “Romeo and Juliet at an Historically Black College/University” in Romeo and Juliet, Adaptation, and the Arts: ‘Cut Him Out in Little Stars’ (The Arden Shakespeare); “Reconsidering and Recasting” in Contemporary Black Theatre and Performance: Acts of Rebellion, Activism, and Solidarity (Bloomsbury Press). PhD in Theatre Research, University of Wisconsin Madison; MFA in Acting, West Virginia University; BA in English, Webster University.