Photo of the Week, 25: Et tu, Brute? “Julius Caesar” at the Consistory, 1931

Long before the 1978 inaugural season of what would become the Illinois
Shakespeare Festival (held at the Ewing Cultural Center), local
residents enjoyed one of the Bard's tragedies at another popular
Bloomington venue.
This October
1931 staging of Shakespeare's “Julius Caesar" was the work of Delmar D.
Darrah. A tireless leader of the fraternal society known as the
Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (or Masons for short), Darrah
played an instrumental role in the construction of the Consistory /
Scottish Rite Temple, which opened in 1922 on the north end of downtown.
With the temple's auditorium and oversized stage in mind, he created a
series of ambitious theatrical productions, most famously “The American
Passion Play." Today, the Consistory is known as the Bloomington Center
for Performing Arts.
Clearly, Darrah's “Julius Caesar" made
expert use of the Passion Play's costumes and famous hand-painted
canvass drops. As Hamlet tells Gertrude in Act 3 of another Shakespeare
tragedy, “Oh, 'tis most sweet, / When in one line two crafts directly
meet."