Thank you Donna Palumbo Hager!

Thank you Donna Palumbo Hager, for stepping in to help our costume department! We you!

about the play

When Gore Vidal adapted Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s “Romulus the Great” in

1962, he had his work cut out for him. American novelist and occasional

playwright, Vidal knew that adaptation went against everything we viewers

hold sacred in the art of theatre. Namely, an unshaking fidelity to the

writer’s own authentic experiences.

Romulus embodies Vidal’s obsession with classical culture, but that’s where

Vidal’s relatability to the Swiss playwright’s work seems to end. He once

commented that Roman life couldn’t be further away from the modern

American experience if it tried. If that is the case, what is he trying to pull

off by dropping our theatre-goers smack-dab in the middle of antiquity?

While the play’s ambiguities deliberately evade a direct response to

that question, the work’s key themes quickly, and brilliantly, unfold to

obvious effect. Respectfully eloquent, yet deliberately biting, Vidal’s play

encompasses what we anticipate most in a modern lyricist: the adoration

of morality contrasted with the gradations and subjectivity of our own

personal truths. He is able to make a far-off world relevant by infusing

it with lofty, objective truths and the uncertainties inherent in each and

everyone one of us.

But Vidal was able to succeed where even some of the most talented

playwrights struggled, not only because he harped on life’s most intangible

philosophical questions, but because he put the conversation precisely in a

tone we understand, which is to say, political.

Vidal takes Dürrenmatt’s backdrop of the fall of the Roman empire and

injects it with scathing irony, a task Vidal was readily equipped to handle.

Vidal’s Romulus little resembles the real Romulus Augustus, Rome’s last

Caesar who barely reached adolescence when he inadvertently presided over

the fall of the Roman emperor, much to everyone’s dismay. That’s about the

end of this play’s historical references. Our Romulus doesn’t just accept the

fall of civilization as he knows it, he quite condones it.

Prancing around the palace as Rome literally crumbs, Romulus has the

undesirable task of warding off political players he rejects and despises.

From the phony capitalistic pants manufacturer, whose business ventures

seem to garner him reluctant public support despite his cluelessness to the

bureaucrats who operate under meaningless terms and convoluted policy

plans to hide the fact that they are more cogs in the machine, we can’t help but

see the detriments of our own political landscape.

But when Romulus finally meets his antithesis, the ominous German invader

Ottaker, we are left with more than political commentary. The scene is not

marked by victorious battles of brute force. Instead, we find a showdown

between ideologies that is both provocative and amusing. Ottaker tugs and

pulls at Romulus’ logic until the great Caesar’s philosophical underpinnings,

which he’s spent a lifetime concocting, barely have a leg to stand on, making

Romulus’ neat bifurcations of the world – wrong vs right, past vs future,

truth vs falsehood – seem a little too naïve. But in the face of his own

internal inconsistencies, Romulus’ cunning wit finds some push back of his

own and he undercovers just as much fault in Ottaker’s new world order as

that of his old. Whether or not our heroes and antiheroes have triumphed

or been defeated, discerned the cold hard truth or equivocated yet again,

we’re forced to reckon with some inconvenient and subtle similarities

between their world and ours.

Who knows, there may just be a lesson here about the decay of the Roman

empire that can inform our contemporary ideas of American exceptionalism.

Or maybe it’s just a slight jab at the thought of making America great again.

From the director

Romulus: We are at the razor’s edge. My friends, today of all days we wear the

mask of Comedy!

When I first read this play, I thought it was interesting, clever, and chock full

of allusions that could be humorously relevant to our current political climate.

A Fall comedy about the Fall of the Roman Empire for a community that I

hoped would not have already been so relentlessly flogged by a campaign season

(which itself would be comic if the stakes were not so high) that no one could

muster a chuckle.

But as it turns out, Romulus, the Emperor, is a pretty dark guy; an absolutist

who deliberately steers the bus (with everyone on it) over a cliff as a moral

example. That’s not a comic hero one necessarily wants to laugh along with.

In fact, over the past 10 weeks as our troupe brought this work to life, I began

to realize that what I had thought was mostly a satiric comedy is, at its core, a

rather somber meditation on our society safely dressed up in the garb of antiquity.

Yet, Gore Vidal, one of the most urbane, scholarly, and acerbic social

commentators of his day, clearly had a soft spot for our country’s dedication to

the peaceful transfer of power. He wrote this play when McCarthyism was still

a raw wound, the Cold War was raging, and the presidential campaign of 1960,

which pitted Richard Nixon against John F. Kennedy, had just concluded by an

historically slim margin.

In an almost sentimental twist, when the nihilistic protagonist, Romulus, finally

meets Ottaker the Goth -- the enemy of civilization who has waged war because

of public opinion to advance an “ism” which he knows is meaningless -- there

is no bloodbath; there is no head on a pike. There is a peaceful, if curious,

transfer of power.

Voltaire observed, “True comedy is the ‘speaking picture’ of the follies and

foibles of a nation.” And Vidal added to that, “True comedy uses everything. It

is sharp; it is topical; it does not worry about its own dignity…it merely mocks

the false dignity of others.”

I hope that our interpretation of this odd, funny, and provocative play

illuminates some dark patches in our own political landscape – or at least helps

us pose the right questions. Lord knows there has been no shortage of follies

and foibles as we make our own transition from one political leader to the next.

Rina Steinhauer