Conversations in Tusculum

BRUTUS FORCE Quinn, right, implores Dennehy to action.

Photograph: Michal Daniel

The title of Richard Nelson’s new historical drama, Conversations in Tusculum, is unimpeachably accurate: The play consists of nothing more than characters in a Roman suburb, in 45 B.C., talking about what is to be done (or not to be done) about the power-hungry Julius Caesar. This unceasing discussion is intended as an allegory for the American public’s willful tolerance of the megalomaniacal tendencies of the Bush administration. We all talk and complain, Nelson implies, but what do we actually do about it?

Considering that the play’s central character is Caesar’s erstwhile ally Brutus (Quinn, rougher around the edges than at his Hollywood peak), anyone who’s taken ninth-grade history knows the eventual answer. But before we get to that big, stabby murder (which Nelson wisely relegates to Shakespeare’s 1599 sequel), Brutus must earnestly debate suicide, war and vanity with military man Cassius (Strathairn) and senator-scholar Cicero (Dennehy)—all endowed by the country setting, and by Susan Hilferty’s anachronistic non-toga costumes, with a faux-Chekhovian wistfulness calculated to humanize the dry, dense verbiage. But even seasoned actors like Quinn, Strathairn and Dennehy can’t make all their chatter feel immediate and compelling. Taken line by line, Conversations in Tusculum has an undeniable dignity, sincerity and sense of public duty, but as a whole it is impressively, comprehensively dull.

—Jeff Lewonczyk