Toga! Toga! Toga!

For 12 years, under open skies that turn from blue to black, the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival has given Kansas City one of its finest summer refreshments. But even though most of its productions have been more than respectable, it hasn’t always been all’s well. Presenting the Bard for modern audiences can be tricky. I remember a past summer’s King Lear (a play I know fairly well) that might as well have been performed in Swahili.

But even though Julius Caesar is as complex as any of the poet’s history plays, this production didn’t confound at all. For all of its bloody twists and turns, it’s easy — and a pleasure — to follow. Even the preteens in the crowd seemed rapt, as if stoned on Game Boys.

There’s good acting all over this Caesar, and credit for the show’s logical unfolding has to go equally to director Sidonie Garrett and her design crew. Set designer James T. Lane Jr.’s majestic, titanic palace also deserves mention, but this troupe of actors presents a work so honest and immediate, you’ll feel like another character in the drama.

As the play opens to eerie, backward-masked music by festival composer Greg Mackender, Brutus (Mark Robbins) and Cassius (David Fritts) are steamed. They’re seeing their ideals for an equitable democracy crumble under the self-inflated thumb of the self-anointed Caesar (John Rensenhouse). He’s not a king or a god, but he’s awfully full of himself; he enters the play — with bleached blond hair and cherry-red sandals — as the biggest rock star in his universe. His wife, Calpurnia (Melinda McCrary), looks on adoringly, but she’s also visibly nervous; she can’t diminish her husband’s strut.

A grizzly soothsayer (Matt Rapport) is a welcome distraction to all that pomposity. His familiar warning about the Ides of March goes unheeded, though Calpurnia has a ghastly dream the night before that date envisioning her husband as a statue dripping with blood. To Brutus and Cassius and their convincingly swayed minions, it’s a foregone conclusion: Caesar must be killed.

The hour-and-three-quarters first act is the necessarily lengthy setup for the violent repercussions of the “three and thirty” stab wounds coming Caesar’s way. Outside the grieving city, war is inevitable between ringleader Brutus’ followers and those whom Caesar-loyalist Marc Antony deceptively draws to his breast. As Brutus’ popularity dwindles, he begins to go a little crazy, proclaiming that those who take offense at his tactics don’t love their country; he’s become the progenitor to John Ashcroft. The battle scenes are beautifully mounted both on and just behind the stage, complete with fiery lighting (designed by Marcus Abbott and Ward Everhart) and effective fight choreography by Martin English and William Grey Warren. Mary Traylor’s costumes also become more brutish, with the first act’s flowing robes giving way to steely helmets and sturdy breastplates.

The large cast (all males but for McCrary and Merle Moores as Portia, Brutus’ wife) is mostly terrific. They simmer when their ire must be contained and, when it no longer can be, bare their teeth like vicious “dogs of war.” Only Stephen Milton, playing several roles, is problematic. He seems quite taken with his Tim Curryesque delivery, which is too comic by half. He seems to think he’s in one of the Bard’s tongue-in-cheek comedies. But it’s a minor distraction in a major production.