Avant Bard's second mainstage season production, Julius Caesar, returns from an untimely cancellation in the spring of 2020. Julius Caesar is directed by award-winning artist and director Kathleen Akerley, who also serves as Artistic Director of Longacre Lea. Julius Caesar famously explores a vacuum in leadership, but within a political structure that is too alien to us to be anything other than a period piece or bluntly handled metaphor. Avant Bard's reimagining modernizes the politics without targeting Caesar, but by removing Caesar entirely from the stage. This production will focus on an ensemble of nine actors who dismantle this traditional story to explain how leadership is not defined by Caesar's ambition or Brutus' and Antony's famous funeral speeches, but by the shifting personalities and demands of the citizenry. Video and projections will accompany the actors on stage to place these questions squarely in post-2016 America: is consensus even possible?