The Oregon Shakespeare Festival Tackles Tyranny with an All-Female and Nonbinary Cast
“Brutus could be any of us today in our deeply divided society who believe ourselves to be people of honor and integrity,” Director Rosa Joshi says, “and who want to live in a free and just society.”
Though long regarded as synonymous with betrayal, the Tragedy of Julius Caesar also reminds us that humanity will always instinctively fight tyranny. It’s an inherently human survival mechanism. And while that historical conviction is enduring, its never-ending necessity is disheartening. Do we truly learn nothing from history repeating itself?
Watching the 400-year-old play through the chaos of 2025 MAGAmerica, the political tyranny painfully reigns more relevant than the personal betrayal.
Julius Caesar proves that political thrillers, unfortunately, never age.
If Brutus is indeed the protagonist, his anti-hero parallel to Luigi Mangioni is hard to ignore, as more Americans die from the tyranny of the American healthcare system and medical debt.
Whether Caesar is the protagonist or not, his parallels to historical and current cult-of-personality totalitarian leaders are equally hard to ignore.
“If he be so resolved, I can oversway him, for he loves to hear that unicorns may be betrayed with trees, lions with toils, and men with flatterers,” Decius Brutus says of Caesar. “But when I tell him he hates flatterers, he says he does, being then most flattered.”
There are no tyrants without yes men.
“It is a drama famous for the difficulty of deciding which role to emphasize. The characters rotate around each other like the plates of a Calder mobile. Touch one and it affects the position of all the others. Raise one, and another sinks. But they keep coming back into a precarious balance,” classicist and political writer Gary Wills said in a 2011 essay, Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. “This play is distinctive because it has no villains.”
Are tyrants not villains? Does preemptive violence prevent greater violence?
This rendition of Julius Caesar is distinctive because it has no men.
Actor Kate Hurster has played both husband and wife, Brutus and Portia, in different Oregon Shakespeare Festival productions of Julius Caesar.
Her portrayal of Brutus in this 2025 OSF season doesn’t just “turn Elizabethan convention on its head,” as Director Joshi says of the eras past when only men could be actors. It turns modern society on its head in that, at least from behind the fourth wall, no men are in charge at all. Though the actors call each other sir and countrymen, men don’t even exist on this stage.
The entire multiethnic female and nonbinary cast depicts a world in which women and nonbinary people of various ages and ethnicities are leaders, plebians, senators, and soldiers struggling with the complexities of political turmoil, military strategy, their consciences, and each other.
Audiences typically only see CIS white men ravaged by inner conflict, redefining patriotism, and nobly fighting for their countrymen.
Women’s characters are rarely complex enough to navigate higher-level philosophical questions of political allegiance and social honor, let alone the moral quandary of revolutionary violence. They don’t grapple with the threat that monarchic concentration of power poses to a democratic republic. Women on screen complain about boys or nag their husbands or chase children, or, with no decision-making ability of their own, helplessly cry to men, What do we do now?! When they are portrayed as anything more than headless sex objects or Princess Peaches to be won, female characters seldom pass the Bechdel-Wallace test, despite how painfully basic it is.
Are two or more female characters portrayed on the screen at the same time?
Do they talk to each other?
If so, do they talk about anything besides men or a man?
Nonbinary people fight for their very existence in real life, let alone their representation in the arts. Women older than 40 rarely portray anyone but grandmothers or witches. Non-white actors are still pigeonholed into typecast roles. But a Shakespeare festival in a beautiful city known for live theater features all of them.
“An ensemble of powerful women and nonbinary people helps to draw our attention to the male-dominated political landscape that continues to shape the world we live in,” Director Joshi says of the cast. “As with all my work with upstart crow, this production invites an audience to expand its notion of who gets to tell these stories on stage.”
The standout storyteller in this production is Jessika D. Williams in her, not exaggerating, mesmerizing take on Mark Antony. With a role in Dr. Who and more than 50 Shakespeare credits to her name, including Othello himself, Williams’ natural charisma and magnetic stage presence make her the lodestar. She’s the one you can’t stop watching.
The austere set design drives most of the focus on the dizzying dialogue, the memorization of which is almost a scientific marvel by the cast. Caro Zeller as Cassius and Amelio García as Caska, along with Hurster and Williams, defy the imagination with their mastery of Shakespearean English.
As the audience began to clap, one man’s deep voice boomed “BRAVO” from the back of the theater. Twice. The audience clapped louder and nodded appreciatively.
“It’s a play about who we are,” Director Joshi concludes in the playbill, “that asks us who we want to become.”
More pressingly, Joshi asks, “How will we find a path forward, free of violence?”
This OSF production of Julius Caesar runs from March 7th to October 26th, 2025, at the Angus Bowmer Theater in Ashland, Oregon.
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