Al Letson on his play Julius X

You may know Al Letson as a journalist—he’s the host of the popular investigative podcast Reveal. Before that, he created and hosted the public radio show State of the Re:Union. But Letson is also an actor, writer, playwright, and poet. His play, Julius X: A Re-envisioning of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, kicks off Folger Theatre’s 2025–26 season.

Julius X isn’t an adaptation of Julius Caesar—it’s a new play that borrows from Shakespeare’s language, characters, and plot to tell a different story. In Letson’s play, Julius X is a fictionalized version of Malcolm X. The play mixes lines from Shakespeare with Letson’s original poetry and songs. It expands the roles of Shakespeare’s female characters, as well as that of Cinna the poet.

Letson discusses the origin story of Julius X—hint: it involves an audition; his lifelong love for Malcolm X; and the lessons he learned as an artist from Bill Moyers’ series, The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets.

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or your favorite podcast platform.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published September 9, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Al Letson is the Peabody Award-winning host of Reveal. Born in New Jersey, he moved to Jacksonville, Florida, at age 11 and, as a teenager, began rapping and producing hip-hop records. By the early 1990s, he had fallen in love with the theater, becoming a local actor and playwright, and soon discovered slam poetry. In 2000, Letson placed third in the National Poetry Slam and performed on Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam, which led him to write and perform one-man shows like Summer in Sanctuary.

In Letson’s travels around the country, he realized that the America he was seeing on the news was far different from the one he was experiencing up close. In 2007, he competed in the Public Radio Talent Quest, where he pitched a show called State of the Re:Union that reflected the conversations he was having throughout the US. The show ran for five seasons and won a Peabody Award in 2014. In 2015, Letson helped create and launch Reveal, the nation’s first weekly investigative radio show, which has won two duPont Awards and three Peabody Awards and been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize twice. He has also hosted the podcast Errthang; written and developed several TV shows with major networks, including AMC+’s Moonhaven and Apple TV+’s Monarch; and DC Comics recently released his series Mister Terrific: Year One.

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Director Rosa Joshi on Julius Caesar Today

FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music fades]

KARIM-COOPER: You may know Al Letson as a journalist—he’s the host of the popular investigative podcast Reveal. Before that, he created and hosted the public radio show State of the Re:Union.

But Letson is also an actor, writer, playwright, and poet. DC Comics recently released his series Mr. Terrific: Year One. And he’s currently showrunning a forthcoming TV series called Kingmaker for Starz.

His play Julius X: A Re-envisioning of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare opens later this month at the Folger Theatre. It’s directed by Nicole Brewer.

Julius X isn’t an adaptation of Julius Caesar—it’s a new play that borrows from Shakespeare’s language, characters, and plot to tell a different story. In Letson’s play, Julius X is a fictionalized version of Malcolm X.

Just like the real Malcolm, Julius returns from a pilgrimage to Mecca with plans to break from the powerful Nation of Islam. Some of his closest advisors think those plans are dangerous and decide to assassinate Julius to stop him.

The play mixes lines from Shakespeare with Letson’s original poetry and songs. It expands the roles of Shakespeare’s female characters, as well as that of Cinna the poet. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Cinna the poet is killed by a mob when he’s mistaken for one of the conspirators.

Here’s Al Letson, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

——————–

BARBARA BOGAEV: I was hoping you could read from the very beginning of the play or perform the Cinna speech.

AL LETSON: Sure, sure, sure. So, this is Cinna the Poet and this is the very beginning of the play.

[Al Letson reads the opening to his play, Julius X: A Re-envisioning of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare.]

CINNA THE POET:
This is not the story
you know,
but somewhere in-between,
The penumbra where all dreams
are given birth, the land of our ancestors,
forgotten and lost in the recesses of our minds
before TV’s, movie screens;
hell, even before books
held the wonderment of what could be,
We used to dream children.
Close our eyes,
Tune in, turn on, and drop out
But now time done went and got all convoluted
when we wasn’t looking.
She done jammed up her airwaves,
left us with low frequency,
no band width,
no where to broadcast,
no antennae to receive,
nothing but white noise.
Can you dig?
And so we begin.
Our destiny wrapped in the cloak of our past,
the path we now walk, where reality and sur-reality meet
dreams die,
fall off the trees like leaves
nightmares form into crows
land on our limbs and sing the new hymns
that have left us in this place.
Shake it off.
Close your eyes,
and dream children,
dream.
—Julius X, Act I, scene 1

BOGAEV: Wow, I love it. Thank you so much. I hear that other voice in you: the minister voice.

LETSON: Yeah, it’s in my blood. It just kind of pops out.

BOGAEV: Yeah, your father was a minister, I know. But man, it’s strong. So, tell me about writing this opening speech. What place did you want to get your audience?

LETSON: Yeah, I wanted to… like, the whole purpose of Cinna—especially in the beginning—was to introduce the audience to a new way of thinking about The Tragedy of Julius Caesar and to prepare them that, you know, this is not the story you know. We’re remixing it, changing it up, and doing different things with it, and so, I felt like I had to do something to kind of introduce the audience into this new world. So, for me Cinna represents like a bridge or a portal, if you will, into what you know and into the unknown.

BOGAEV: That makes so much sense because Cinna is also that perfect metaphor for the violence that begets more senseless violence. It just goes on and on. You give Cinna more of a role throughout your play. He’s the commenter.

LETSON: Yeah. I was thinking a lot about who needed to be served more in the original text when moving it into this world, and so, the thing that I was thinking about was Cinna. And then I thought a lot about the women in the original play. Look, I love Shakespeare but the women roles were underwritten. So, yeah, those were the two things that I really wanted to concentrate on as far as like characters that I wanted to elevate.

BOGAEV: This is a little bit off the subject, but as I was reading that opening, it reminded me that you have covered a lot of protests as a journalist and you did once jump to the aid of someone at a Rally Against Hate that you were covering. He was getting chased and attacked by the mob and you shielded him. And ironically, in speaking to Julius Caesar in a senseless mob, it turned out that it was Antifa attacking a right-wing guy. I just wondered if you flashed back to that personal experience you had of mob violence when you were writing this.

LETSON: No, because I wrote this long before that happened. I wrote Julius X like many, many, many, many, many, many moons ago. And the incident that happened in Berkeley, I want to say that was 2016. At the moment that I jumped on top of that guy, I just thought I was going to die. That was the only thing I was thinking about.

BOGAEV: No play jumped to your mind!

LETSON: No. All I was thinking was “What are we doing?” and “Oh, this may not have been a good idea, Al.”

BOGAEV: Okay, so this play goes way back. What is the origin?

LETSON: The origin is when I was a kid. I’m dyslexic and I struggled with reading when I was younger. I learned how to read through comic books—which I have a deep abiding love for.

But when I got into high school, we started reading Shakespeare and I understood it. I think I understood it better than most of the kids in my class because, you know, Shakespeare is written like poetry. The lines are short and it was easy for me to track. I remember being in class one day and we were reading Othello and Iago’s monologue when he’s saying, like, “You can bet on it or put money in the bank that I’m going to get this guy.”

BOGAEV: Well, yeah, Iago says straight out, “I’ve told you over and over. I hate the Moor.”

LETSON: Yeah, exactly, and I remember telling my classmates because they didn’t get it, I was like, “Come on y’all. He’s saying ‘You can bank on it,’ you know?” And I remember doing a little monologue taking the text and speaking it in a way to my classmates that, you know, they could understand. So, for me Shakespeare became like a little bit of a superpower because I understood it.

Then, there was a production of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar and I really wanted to play Mark Antony because that speech, you know, “Friends, Romans, countryman, lend me your ears,” is one of my all-time favorites. The writing on it is just exquisite. I absolutely love it. And I wasn’t cast at all, and I was ticked off about it, you know? I’m like, you know, 17 and didn’t get the role, didn’t get any role, and was really mad. And then fast forward, I was in my twenties, and they did a local production of it in Jacksonville, and again, I didn’t get cast, and I was just furious. With that one, I felt like, you know—this is a long time ago—but that one I felt like they weren’t doing non-traditional casting so, the idea of like, you know, a Black kid playing Mark Antony just seemed wild to them. So, I never got cast.

BOGAEV: So, now you’re furious. You’re really, really pissed off.

LETSON: Yes, and so, I was like, “You know what, I’m just going to make my own version of it.”

I also grew up like loving Malcolm X. When I was a kid, my mom had a copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and when I was really young, I tried to read it and didn’t really understand it. I got into high school and read it, and it seemed in weird ways to make sense of my life and I held close to that text.

I don’t remember exactly the inspiration for mashing the two together, but I remember where all the ingredients came from, and I can see, you know, it’s an easy thing to cook.

BOGAEV: An easy recipe. It’s reminding me of a lot of people come on this show and talk about—especially people who grew up in England—they talk about how Shakespeare, kind of their whole lives since it starts so early, they’ve been in conversation with him.

LETSON: Yeah. You know, when I was younger, I didn’t feel like I was in conversation with Shakespeare, but I definitely felt like I was in conversation with Malcolm X. I was pondering, like, the things that he was saying, both pre-pilgrimage and post-pilgrimage because it feels like very different versions of the man.

I think the Shakespeare thing kind of leads into the Malcolm X thing in the sense that—and I’m not blaming this on anybody, I’m just saying that this is the way I felt about it—Shakespeare felt like something that was not for me. Living in the South, it was for rich, white people. And so, I think that what Malcolm taught me was sometimes you just got to kick. If they won’t let you in, you kick the door down. I have just as much a right to all of it. Like, I am an American, I am a human being, and this is a part of, you know, what it means to be a human being. Shakespeare told stories that touch on the human experience. And they’re not owned by the British. They’re not owned by Americans. They’re owned by the world and I’m a part of that. And so, all of those things kind of played together.

BOGAEV: And you see those essential stories in Julius Caesar representing Malcolm X because there’s so many parallels between the two. I feel like we need a primer right now. Maybe you should remind everybody about the historical rift between Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, which mirrors this conflict between Caesar and the conspirators.

LETSON: Yeah, on the Malcolm X side, Malcolm was a minister in the Nation of Islam, which was a sect of Black Muslims who practiced their own version of Islam and Malcolm was the most famous minister. The leader, Elijah Muhammad, the leader kind of mentored Malcolm, but Malcolm began to outshine him. And then at some point Malcolm found out that the leader was doing, you know, things that men do, especially men in leadership.

BOGAEV: Sleeping around?

LETSON: Right, exactly, and so, it caused a big rift. But also, you know, on the other side, I think that there was a lot of jealousy within the organization towards Malcolm because he was becoming so famous.

And so, Malcolm left the organization. He went on a pilgrimage. He learned, I think what some would say, the true form of Islam, and he converted. And then he came back and advocated as he was before for Black people but he was doing it in more of a focused way than he had before. And also his outlook on the world and race changed. He began to understand the nuance of it, right? Like, he didn’t think that all white people were devils, although he probably thought a lot of them were, but he began to, like, think that the way to go about equality for Black folks, that you need allies.

So, yeah, he was just an amazing human being, but you know, also very much a human being. He was flawed like all of us are. And so, at the end of his life, he was murdered at the Audubon Ballroom. A lot of people believe the government had something to do with it, and also the Nation of Islam had something to do with it.

BOGAEV: Well, there were infiltrators, government infiltrators from the FBI and NYPD.

LETSON: Right, exactly.

BOGAEV: It’s a hornet’s nest.

LETSON: Yeah, it’s a hornet’s nest full of conspiracy theories, and somewhere in there is truth. What is definitely true is that he was betrayed by the community that he had led so long.

With Julius Caesar, it was a lot of that as well. I think, you know, the huge difference between Julius Caesar and Malcolm X is that Julius Caesar was a tyrant and Malcolm X was not. So, in the play, Julius X the character is much more Malcolm than he is Julius Caesar. It’s sort of Malcolm in the circumstances of Julius Caesar.

BOGAEV: Yeah, the differences are really interesting. Shakespeare doesn’t set Caesar up so much as a tyrant as an incipient tyrant, a potential tyrant. Also, he’s a figure of mob worship and so is Julius X.

But the main beef in your play that Brutus and Cassius have with Julius X is that he wants to break from the Nation—and he has different ideas about the use of violence now after his pilgrimage—and they still want the protection and the power that the Nation of Islam provides them.

LETSON: Yeah, I think everything you say I agree with. I would just also say that Cassius is a very jealous man. If Cassius was leading it and they were breaking from the Nation, he’d be fine with breaking from the Nation. It’s really about his jealousy, his inability to be the same man that Julius is. So, he talks about, like, “We’re at the feet of a colossus. But you know, we were swimming once and he almost drowned and I had to save him. Like, I’m just as good as him and yet nobody is praising me.”

BOGAEV: That’s his male ego speech.

LETSON: Absolutely. I remember when I was writing this—and this is like such a tangent—but when I was writing this, I was listening to a Biggie Smalls album. Such a tangent but on one of Biggie Smalls’ albums, he has a skit on there. It’s called The Mad Rapper and the Mad Rapper, all he does is like, you know, someone interviews him and is like, “Why are you so mad?” and the Mad Rapper is like, “Because, you know, my songs are more John Blaze than him. I’m just as good. I’m more John Blaze.” It’s such like small man energy, right? Like he wants to be the big guy, but he cannot be the big guy, he just doesn’t have it. Cassius has that.

And Brutus thinks of himself as such an upstanding man. But the key is that like, yeah, sure, he probably is upstanding in a lot of ways. But what gets in Brutus’ way, I think, is the vision of who he is. He thinks that he is upstanding in everything he does, and really, it’s his fatal flaw.

BOGAEV: Self-righteousness. He just oozes it.

LETSON: Exactly. So, it’s like those two things, right? It’s like jealousy from one guy who can whisper into the ear of the self-righteous man and reinforce his self-righteousness, and that’s how you get into this mess.

[CLIP from Julius X. Al Letson reads Brutus.]

BRUTUS:
They say he’s changed,
yesterday’s promises crumble into today
the fine debris robbing
our breath
suffocating our souls.
Ripping out our hearts.
I know not the cure
except his death.
The cancer removed,
the soul revived,
and Harlem whole again
paid for with blood.
Yet I am no surgeon,
but the knife is in my hands.
They say the streets
love the name Brutus,
but will they hold me so,
with blood stains on my soul?
If the city opens a vein
and washes us all away?
The streets,
the Brownstones,
the parks,
the projects
under a sea of red
Oh Harlem,
Oh Harlem,
Oh Harlem,
Let this cup pass.
—Julius X, Act II, scene 1

BOGAEV: So, I want to talk about the language because it’s so transporting. We heard a little bit of it in the Cinna speech. But how did you think about language in this play? Because you go from very faithful Shakespeare quotes to modern slang, kind of in a heartbeat.

LETSON: Yeah. I mean, that was, like, the job I think with this play. First of all, I love Shakespeare’s original text. But I felt very much that, you know, so much of writing and performing is about confidence. You have to be confident in your writing so that the reader, or the person performing it, or the audience receiving it knows that they’re in good hands and they’re willing to go on this journey with you. If you’re not confident in those things, I personally think that that’s where you lose audiences because they’re like, “Wait, you’re going between things and you’re not stating what you are.”

And I think that, you know, if I was going to do a mashup of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, and Malcolm X’s life, and my own work, then I fully had to own it. The way that I owned it was by taking a little bit of Julius Caesar, taking a little bit of the type of language they used in the ‘60s, and then imbuing it, using me as a glue to bring all of those things together.

So, for me, I just wanted to go deep into it and be confident about it, like, “Hey, this is how this play sounds. Ride with me.” Just like Shakespeare says to you. Shakespeare was speaking in the language of his times but now, taken out of time where we are, that text is so confident in what it’s trying to say because that’s what it’s always said.

BOGAEV: Right? That was his voice. What I think has worked so well is the consistency because you go from exquisite poetry to modern slang with its own exquisite poetry and heartbeat.

LETSON: Yeah, thank you. I mean that was the goal. I’m glad you feel that way.

BOGAEV: You sound a little doubtful. I guess it does come down to your director too and your actors.

LETSON: Oh, absolutely.

BOGAEV: You let this thing into the world and who knows what’s going to happen with it.

LETSON: Can I tell you a secret? I’m going to tell you a secret.

BOGAEV: It’s a secret. No one’s listening.

LETSON: Yes. So, I will not say where but once this play was performed somewhere. The director didn’t get it and wasn’t able to bring it all together. I have a videotape because I was recording it. I have a videotape where, like, the lens is upright and you’re seeing the play and then slowly it tilts to the side. It tilts to the side because I’m falling asleep as I’m watching my own play.

BOGAEV: Oh, that’s a low point in a writer’s life.

LETSON: Let me tell you. And then, at the reading at the Folger I was like, “Oh my god, my play.” Nicole [Brewer, the director of the Folger production] just does such a great job. The cast did such a great job. This play was read with The Classical Theatre of Harlem, and oh my god, they just took it to another level. So like, I can do all the things that I do, but it has to be interpreted by the right people and the Folger and The Classical Theatre of Harlem were definitely the right people. They really did just amazing work.

BOGAEV: Your father—we said this before, your father was a minister, and you grew up in the church—so, do the rhythms of sermons influence your writing as you’re doing it? And also, the way that you experience poetry like Shakespeare?

LETSON: Yeah, 100%. It’s been in me my whole life. You know, many years ago, I was a slam poet, a spoken word artist, and, you know, it was a part of who I was. The way Baptist preachers speak, there’s just a rhythm to it. Cven if they’re not saying anything poetic, I feel like there’s poetry to it. And I grew up in it. It’s been such a part of my life that when I am performing and when I am writing, especially like when I was writing Julius X, it just rings in my head and feels true and right. And so yeah, I just, I lean into it. I lean into it because it’s me. It’s such a part of what’s in my creative DNA.

BOGAEV: Which is important because it’s authentic and it comes through. There’s a chorus in Julius X.

LETSON: Oh yeah, definitely. I remember when I was a little kid, we used to go to church and when we got there in the morning time, the elders of the church would be doing this thing that they call “Devotional.” Devotional was they took a hymn, and they sung it so slow and deep. I remember as a kid being scared as hell of that singing. Like, it freaked me out.

BOGAEV: Why?

LETSON: Well because now that I think about it it’s like the most Southern Gothic thing, you know, you’ve got all of…

BOGAEV: They’re all in their suits.

LETSON: Right. They’re all in these black suits with white shirts. They’re older Black men. Their voices are deep and baritone and they would sing so slow that I felt like they were conjuring spirits.

BOGAEV: It’s like an exorcism.

LETSON: Yes, it scared the hell out of me. I can still, like, as I’m describing it to you, I hear it in my head. The hymn—it was always the same hymn—and the hymn was like a charge to carry. And so, they would be so deep and they’d be like, “a charge.” As a kid, it freaked me out. As an adult, I would give anything to hear those men sing again. Oh god, it would take me back to a whole different place and time. But that sound is definitely like deeply in me and it totally influenced what I did and wrote with the soothsayers.

BOGAEV: Wow. Well, I’m thinking that kind of childhood, just that childhood impression and those rhythms and that resonance, it goes so deep to some kind of like preverbal place in us. Which I think the best theater does too.

LETSON: Oh, absolutely.

BOGAEV: I mean, that is theater.

LETSON: Yep, absolutely.

BOGAEV: But we’re also in this really challenging time for the arts, right? Under this administration and this crackdown on dissent, and on free speech, and on diverse viewpoints. You wear so many hats. You’ve got your writing hat. I know you’re writing a TV show now. You’re in a TV writer’s room. But you’re also a journalist. What are your thoughts about the role of Shakespeare in theater in general in this moment?

LETSON: Well, I think my thoughts about Shakespeare extend to all the arts. And that is, to quote a famous philosopher, you got to fight the powers that be, you know? And every step we get, we have to raise our fists and say that we are here and that this is wrong—and also, we ain’t going nowhere. These people can come in and say that slavery wasn’t so bad and that America has to be this place that reflects the complexions of the Founding Fathers and I’m just like, “Yeah man, sorry. You can try to do that all you want, but we are never going away. I’m never going away.”

I feel like the arts has to plant a flag and say like, “Yeah, dude, we’re not going anywhere and we’re going to keep telling the truth.” I don’t remember who said this, but I remember when I was young, Bill Moyers had a special. It was called The Language of Life and there were a bunch of poets on there. I don’t remember which poet said it, but I’m like in my early twenties listening to this and the poet said, “The job of the poet is to tell the truth.”

That has never left me. It has stuck with me that my job is to tell the truth even when it’s uncomfortable. Come what may, what consequences from telling the truth comes, if I want to call myself an artist, then that’s what the job is. So, I think that theater, music, all the different forms of expression, need to speak that truth over and over and over—and loudly. And whether or not the world listens, like that’s not my concern. What my concern is is that this is what my job is and that’s what I’m going to do.

I don’t apply this philosophy to anybody else’s art. I’m not going around judging people saying like, “You should do this.” I don’t believe in that. I believe in like, “I make rules for me.” My rule for my art is that art without purpose is vanity and I just don’t want to be involved in vanity.

So, whatever I’m working on I am thinking about the larger things that I’m trying to communicate to people about the world around me about the things that are churning inside of me, what I’m thinking about. But I’m also trying to find ways to, you know, speak to the commonality in all of us.

I’m just finishing a miniseries with DC comics. I had the honor of writing Mr. Terrific, who is in the new Superman movie. I had the honor of writing, Mr. Terrific’s origin story in a comic book called Mr. Terrific: Year One. That story, what I realized, the thing that I wanted to talk about is, I wanted to talk about brotherhood. And I wanted to talk about, you know, making mistakes and trying to find a way to set it right. I wanted to talk about putting good out in the world when all the odds are against you. To me, like, it fits perfectly with the superhero genre. But I’m not trying to do, like, a superhero story where people just punch each other and they’re not saying anything. I’m trying to do a story where you can get people punching each other, you can get the costumes and the fun, but at the end of the day, if you want, you can walk away with a story that really speaks to our times.

BOGAEV: Oh, Al Letson, you are so busy. I’m really lucky you had some time to come on the show today. Thank you so much.

LETSON: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure. I really appreciate it.

——————–

KARIM-COOPER: That was Al Letson, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Julius X: A Re-envisioning of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare opens at the Folger Theatre September 23, and runs to October 26. You can get tickets and learn more at folger.edu/juliusx.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. We had technical help from Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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