CAZENOVIA — Doyle Judge, a Cazenovia native and New York City-based playwright, is producing his one-act play, “The Tragedy of Nero, Emperor of Rome,” for performance in the 2024 New York Theater Festival.
According to Judge’s website, the play explores the themes of identity and masculinity.
“Emperor Nero, an effeminate, disturbed, and ultimately pathetic young man attempts to reform Rome’s traditional culture through artistic renaissance,” the website states. “Both allies and enemies malign his leadership: Nero struggles through a series of abandonments while his enemies work to depose him.”
Judge’s work was one of a handful of plays selected for the 2024 New York Theater Festival.
Each year, playwrights submit plays of various lengths to the festival’s review committee, which selects those to be produced and performed on an off-Broadway stage in Manhattan. The festival then works with each selected playwright to ensure they have the cast, crew, and technical support needed to put on a successful production.
The performances of “The Tragedy of Nero, Emperor of Rome” are scheduled for Wednesday, Nov. 13 at 4 p.m., Friday, Nov. 15 at 6:30 p.m., and Sunday, Nov. 17 at 1 p.m. at Teatro LATEA in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
Judge, who also penned a full-length version of his play, originally came across Nero’s story in Plutarch’s “Parallel Lives, The Life of Galba.”
“The more I read about Nero, the more I realized he was a lens through which a writer could examine the fall of Rome and its parallels to modern America at both a larger thematic and smaller, more personal level,” he said. “Nero’s life as an effeminate man and rule as a progressive emperor put him at odds with the Roman empire’s traditions and conservatism. His inability to find common ground made it impossible for him to stabilize the chaotic early Roman empire.”
According to Judge, who graduated from Cazenovia High School in 2012, his path to playwriting was long.
“After high school, I focused on getting an unrelated job that I really wanted,” he said. “Once I got the job and realized I didn’t fit, I was forced to consider paths I had never considered before. One of the first new things I tried was reading plays, and around the same time, one of my best friends gave me the advice, ‘[You] know you’ve found the right fit when you can look at the people who did something before you and know you’d be happy if you someday were like them.’ I felt that way about the playwrights and plays I was reading, and so I stuck to it.”
Judge now has over five years of experience writing plays. His focus is on modernizing the language and dramatic styles of Elizabethan England.
“I discovered meter, aesthetics, and phonetics in writing for the first time when I read writers from the time period,” he said. “There was a natural beauty to these fundamental components of writing that I wanted to emulate, and I also want to contribute in some small way to their modernization and inclusion in today’s writing styles.”
According to his website, Judge is currently developing three one-act plays: “Erie,” a 19th-century American riverboat comedy set on the Erie Canal; “Meghan & Harry,” a modern pop-culture comedy about Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s exit from the royal family; and another Roman tragedy.
To learn more about the playwright and his work, visit doylejudge.com .
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