Actually, I don’t I did see them as the male characters, at least not in the short bit that they did for us. For me they were pretty genderless, as there wasn’t much in that bit that pinned down a specific gender. Part of that may have been the names. If they’d been Joe and Sam then I might have been more inclined to see them as male, but names like Casius are sufficiently rare in everyday life that they don’t (for me) have a visceral gender association.

All that said, the snippet we got was really cool, and I’m very much looking forward to the play. I remember reading it in school at about the same age, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a live performance of it since. The people we saw were very powerful, and seeing how they work through the subtleties of the text was quite wonderful. It might be cool to try something like with my First Year Seminar students and an old folk song if I didn’t think they’d shoot me :-).