Bruneau directs an all-female cast in Taffety Punk Theatre Company’s “Julius Caesar,” which runs through Oct. 23 at the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop. A founding Taffety Punk member, Bruneau has directed the company’s two previous annual all-female Shakespeare productions. Why an all-female cast?
Many times theater companies have this brilliant idea to do a Shakespeare play with all men and it’s so rare that they decide to do it with all women. I think it’s always really great to mix it up. There are highly trained, really fantastic actresses that are dying to play these roles.
What’s it like directing women to portray men?
There’s like two women’s roles for every 11 men’s roles in Shakespeare. So you give a girl a huge role with that kind of expanding journey and those challenges, and man, they just go to town…. We have to get on them when occasionally they get a little bit girlie because they are girls and it happens sometimes.
Why “Julius Caesar?”
We kept hearing from everybody that this was the most macho play, this was Shakespeare’s most macho play and to some extent it’s true. … [But] we found these incredibly delicate, sensitive relationships between some of these guys that made it seem a lot less macho than we had expected.
What does an all-female cast bring to the interpretation of the play?
Doing justice to one of Shakespeare’s plays is honestly hard enough. … What we find is that when we plug in a little feminist comment or sort of lift up a passage that might be somewhat demeaning to women or something like that, then it cheapens not only the production, but the whole idea of what we’re doing. It makes it small. We want our comment to be the whole night, to be the whole project, to be the whole annual all-girl thing. That’s what we want to speak for us.
— Anna Waugh
