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Long Beach Shakespeare Company is staging a new adaptation of William Shakespeare’s tragic tale of love and politics, “Antony and Cleopatra” — which director Christian Lee Navarro has pared down to what he calls its “raw, violent” essence.
The play centers on the heady romance between Mark Antony, one of three triumvirate leaders of ancient Rome after Julius Caesar’s assassination, and Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt. The theater says the production heightens the “volatile intimacy between two titans — and the collateral damage of loving without restraint.”
Dominic Ryan Gabriel, who plays Antony in this play as he did in the theater’s recent production of “Julius Caesar,” says that while his character was “focused and untouchable” in the previous play, Antony here is “a powerful leader pulled apart by love, ego and identity.”
And Angelina Green as Cleopatra says her character is “incandescent with intellect, longing and desire” but also vulnerable.
“Beneath the political brilliance is a woman who feels deeply and risks everything,” Green says. “She is sovereign, strategist and performer, yet at her core she is a lover. In choosing love, she gambles her kingdom, her legacy and even herself — unapologetic in her power in a world ruled by men.”
Director Navarro not only streamlined “Antony and Cleopatra” but is transforming Long Beach Shakespeare’s intimate stage for the play, trying to make it more like a theater-in-the-round.
“I’ve placed seats on the stage, on the playing space,” Navarro said in an interview with the Long Beach Post. “The audience is another cast member. It’s the only way I know how to do Shakespeare because I trained in England at Shakespeare’s Globe with some of the best Shakespeareans on the planet.”
Navarro describes the Globe as a round theater with “groundling” audience members literally within arm’s reach of the actors.
“A soliloquy is not a soliloquy into the air,” Navarro said he learned there. “It’s to the audience. You’re speaking with them, and you need something from them. Shakespeare certainly wrote his texts with all that in mind, because he was having them performed in the round. It was much more of a dialogue between audience and actor.”
Such interaction is like a “knife” that cuts through the “fourth wall” that normally divides them, he said, making the theatrical experience more immediate for both.
Navarro, a six-year Long Beach transplant who starred in Netflix’s popular series “13 Reasons Why,” found his way to directing the play fortuitously. He had reached out to the theater wanting to perform as Antony in “Julius Caesar,” only to find out the role had been cast. But when the director of “Antony and Cleopatra” backed out, he saw a chance to contribute to a theater right in his neighborhood.
Directing allows him to move people and have them see themselves on stage, Navarro said, like holding up a mirror to society. But when he first asked producer Holly Leveque if he could take out all the theater’s seats for the production, he said she looked at him like he was crazy.
So instead of having the audience stand like groundlings, the first two rows of seats will be on stage, Navarro said. He also cut the play so it can be performed with no intermission in order to sustain its energy and “current.”
Navarro’s innovative efforts are partly to attract younger people to the theater in today’s TikTok era, he said, having noticed when he saw “Julius Caesar” that the theater’s audience skewed older.
“The eternal appeal of Shakespeare is that you can always bring Shakespeare to yourself,” he said. “And I think we have to do that in theater. We have to adapt these classics so people who are 14, 15, 16 not only understand what’s happening — because the actors have clarity and real sense of perspective — but also hold their attention.”
It’s hard for younger people to sit through a three-hour movie, Navarro said, let alone a three-hour play in a dark theater. Having grown up in the Bronx in New York, attending a performing-arts high school, he noticed in the early 2000s how theater started attracting younger and more diverse audiences with plays like “Wicked” and Lin Manuel Miranda’s “In the Heights” and “Hamilton.”
“I saw these young theater practitioners — writers, directors — really speaking to and creating for themselves the demographic that they wanted to see come,” he said. “And those shows went on to become the most massively popular and successful shows in theater history. The formula is undeniable. If you write for people who are like you, who you want to see come, they will come.”
Navarro said he’s attempting to do that with his directing style, especially with Shakespeare.
“All of the elements are already there,” Navarro said of Shakespeare’s plays. “He’s a universal writer. So I can sift through and find the chords and hit that music so that people go, ‘Oh, yeah, I understand that. I know Romeo and Juliet. I know why Antony and Cleopatra are willing to risk everything because they love each other.’ That’s a universal truth.”
The love between Antony and Cleopatra is what young people know — how two people can become each other’s whole world, Navarro said, to the point of disregarding duty, policy, empire and “everything that is not each other.”
“Who among us hasn’t fallen in love and thought, ‘If all I could do was stare into this person’s eyes, I would be happy’?” Navarro said. “That’s a universal truth. He wrote it 400 years ago, but he was writing about these people who were alive about 1,500 years before him. It’s accessible for everyone.”
Navarro said he noticed anew how compelling “Antony and Cleopatra” is during a recent rehearsal.
“Every single person in the show, every cast member, every character — they are all hanging on every word as if it’s life or death,” he said. “Because these two people hold the reins to two empires — Egypt and Rome — and if they decide to go left or right, it could very well mean the lives of these other characters.”
This production will be “raw, violent and infused with love,” Navarro said of his directorial debut at the theater, adding hopefully, “We’ll see if it matches my intent.”
Long Beach Shakespeare Company’s “Antony and Cleopatra” runs March 7 to 22 at the Helen Borgers Theatre, 4250 Atlantic Ave., with shows Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. Tickets are $30 or $20 for students. For tickets and information, call the box office at 562-997-1494 or visit LBShakespeare.org.