Empire. Religion. Family values.

There’s no place like Rome.

I, Claudius came about when my ex and I decided to rent the entire 1970s BBC miniseries from our local bespoke video store. (Ah, remember vinyl video tapes? Remember Two Boots on Avenue A?) This was during the days when the Iraq War had ground the United States military down into street-by-street combat in towns like Fallujah. Meanwhile, the Bush II/Cheney administration was busy trampling on civil rights to quash domestic dissent, torturing prisoners in global black sites, and advancing their theory of a “unitary executive,” all in the name of the War on Terrorism. Suddenly Robert Graves’s epic saga of the machinations of the Julio-Claudian family to dominate first-century Rome’s political, military, and cultural life as that city transitioned from a democracy-adjacent republic to a full-blown authoritarian empire no longer seemed like a tale from a millennia ago. It felt like it had been written for our own historical moment, The ensuing twenty years of American politics has only reinforced this intuition. 

It was an absolutely bonkers project: Every Monday night for six weeks we presented a new installment, usually distilled from two to three episodes of the original series. We agreed that we wouldn’t hold auditions for the dozens of roles that needed to be cast. We would just ask the friends we cared about to join us on this adventure. Fortunately, we have some incredibly talented, brilliantly comic friends who were game to strap into this roller coaster.
My co-artistic director and I would be in tech for the first installment, rehearsing for the second and third, casting the fourth, and finalizing the script for the fifth and sixth. All while holding down full-time jobs. It was madness. The breakthrough came when we realized that our characters could exist simultaneously in the time of Augustus and in the time of Trump (who was still just a reality show host at that time), We encouraged our actors to ad lib topical jokes, to interact with the audience, to go “off script” as an act of resistance. We wanted to wake our audiences up with a blast of anarchic positivity, not put them to sleep with a PhD dissertation defense.

I still think this might be the single project that I’m most proud of over my entire career as a director/creator. Periodically I’ve been asked if I would ever bring it back. I always decline. Securing the rights would be burdensomely complicated, but more to the point, a large part of what made the performance so exciting was how unpredictable it was–even for those of us onstage. All of that rough magic would need to be sanded down for a commercial run. We captured lightning in a bottle, and you just had to have been there, 

Oh, and “there” technically was the cabaret/concert space under the Acme restaurant on Great Jones between Broadway and Lafayette. I only mention this because after we booked the venue, I learned that John Vaccaro and his Playhouse of the Ridiculous rehearsed and sometimes performed some of the earliest queer plays on the top-floor loft of that very building in the 1960s and 70s. The ancestors were watching over this project indeed.