UNCC professor transforms ‘Julius Caesar’ into a podcast set during the pandemic

On the day of the deadly shooting at UNC Charlotte in 2019, theater department professor Andrew Hartley hid with students in a dressing room, waiting for police to tell them it was safe to come out.

The group had been celebrating at an end of year party when ordered to shelter in place: there was an active shooter on campus. After hours in lockdown, Hartley and his students were able to leave unharmed. But two UNCC students were killed that day, four others injured.

Hartley, 56, had been teaching at UNCC for 16 years.

“I started to have panic attacks or a strange overwhelming sense of being unsafe. I’d be in the grocery store and want to tell people they had to get out of the building,” he said. “I realized that the only way I was going to get out of that dressing room was to write my way out of it.”

Hartley is the Robinson Distinguished Professor of Shakespeare in the school’s Department of Theatre. He’s also the author of 23 adult and young adult novels in fantasy, mystery, science fiction and thriller genres, as well as seven academic books. And he reimagined the theater department’s fall show, “Julius Caesar,” setting it in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and having it performed via podcast.

His most recent fantasy novel, “Impervious” was released in April, a year after the campus shooting. He wrote the book in two weeks and dedicated it to the two students who lost their lives that day, 19-year-old Reed Parlier of Midland and Riley Howell, 21, of Waynesville. Hartley’s book was published by a local company, Falstaff Books.

Digesting Shakespeare

Hartley grew up in Preston, Lancashire, in northern England. His dad was a high school drama teacher. He studied English literature at The University of Manchester and saw Shakespeare performed numerous times at the Royal Exchange Theatre.

Hartley finished his master’s and doctoral work in English literature at Boston University while running Willing Suspension Productions, a theater company focused on non-Shakespearian Renaissance drama. Before moving to Charlotte, he worked in Japan and the University of West Georgia in Carrollton, Ga.

Although Hartley always intended to be a modernist, he reconnected with Shakespeare in graduate school. In class and on the stage he is careful to break down Shakespeare’s words so they’re digestible.

He understands that if the actors don’t understand the meaning of a passage, the audience will lose interest.

Contemporary and relevant

In class, Hartley wants students to see the connections to modern themes.

“I think Shakespeare is something we can all claim a relationship to,” Hartley said. “I’m interested in (Shakespeare) in terms of in the way I can use it to tell stories and raise ideas that feel to me, insistent, urgent, contemporary and relevant.”

Dylan Ireland, a senior from High Point, is majoring in theater arts at UNCC. He plays Julius Caesar and Cinna the Poet in an upcoming production, and performed in the “Twelfth Night” production Hartley directed. He also took Hartley’s Shakespeare in History class last spring.

“We dissected a monologue from a Shakespeare play,” said Ireland, 21. “He was putting it in terms we understood, breaking it down phrase by phrase, it made us see how artistic Shakespeare really is and even though it’s a heightened sense of English, it still is English. He’s allowed me to understand Shakespeare and now I can go about reading it myself.”

Shakespeare in podcast

Hartley began planning for the theater department’s 2020 fall production of “Julius Caesar” pre-pandemic. Faced with COVID-19 restrictions, rather than call it off he re-imagined it performed and enjoyed another way: as a podcast.

“We decided to embrace the restrictions that were being put on us by the university and make it a production that was very contemporary and also specifically about the pandemic,” Hartley said.

“There’s a lot of talk in the original play about sickness and we decided to literalize that. The initial riots at the beginning of the play are about people demanding the reopening of businesses.”

He prepared the script and called it “The Corona Caesar.” The student cast rehearsed on Zoom and recorded each scene a few times. Post-production editing added contemporary sounds such as cars, gunshots and sirens.

“The Corona Caesar” podcast will be released in five episodes beginning Nov. 14. Each is 25 minutes long and may remind listeners of the radio dramas of the early 20th century.

“I chose it (“Julius Caesar”) for now,” Hartley said, “because I knew we’d be on the verge of an election. I wanted to approach a play that would feel contemporary. It’s a play of the rise of two major political leaders on the back of a populist uprising.

“That seemed relevant.”

‘Corona Caesar’

What: The UNC Charlotte Department of Theatre is presenting Andrew Hartley’s play, “The Corona Caesar,” in a five-part podcast series.

When: Nov. 14, 16, 18, 20 and 22

Cost: Free

Details: uncc.edu/events

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This story was originally published October 26, 2020 at 8:22 AM.