Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

You may know Al Letson as a journalist—he’s the host of the popular investigative podcast Reveal. Before that, he created and hosted the public radio show State of the Re:Union. But Letson is also an actor, writer, playwright, and poet. His play Julius X: A Re-envisioning of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare kicks off Folger Theatre's 2025-26 season. Julius X isn’t an adaptation of Julius Caesar — it’s a new play that borrows from Shakespeare’s language, characters, and plot to tell a different story. In Letson’s play, Julius X is a fictionalized version of Malcolm X. The play mixes lines from Shakespeare with Letson’s original poetry and songs. It expands the roles of Shakespeare’s female characters, as well as that of Cinna the poet. Letson discusses the origin story of Julius X - a hint: it involves an audition, his lifelong love for Malcolm X, and the lessons he learned as an artist from Bill Moyers' series, The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets. From the Shakespeare Unlimited pod