Andrew Long, Ted van Griethuysen, and Aubrey K. Deeker form an uneasy alliance in Antony and Cleopatra. Photo by Carol Pratt.

Antony and Cleopatra is a sprawling, lumbering beast of a play — war, international intrigue, doomed love — but the best stuff in the Shakespeare Theatre’s current production is the smallest stuff: he-said/she-said, jealousy, drunkenness. When Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, learns from a rightly mortified messenger that Antony, the Roman General with whom she’s been engaged in a forbidden and yet very public love affair, has married (for the second time), she demands a description of the bride. “What majesty was in her gait?”

“She creeps,” says the messenger (Scott Parkinson), who — like the C.I.A. after a surprise visit from Dick Cheney — instantly perceives his report had better match his ruler’s expectations, the truth of the matter be damned. (As Octavia, the woman of whom the messenger speaks, Kaytie Morris is far easier on the eyes than the Queen’s intelligence would indicate.) And this play is about nothing if not the way personal affections and conflicts can run the ship of state aground.

Pettiness and bawdiness are two traits more commonly reserved for Shakespeare’s supporting players, but they’re front and center here, defining attributes of Cleopatra’s character. Her epic lovesickness (and the way her attendants refuse to lament it, the way Antony’s followers complain that, “Our leader’s led, and we are womens’ men”) is the most memorable thing about this sorta-sequel to Julius Caesar, which the Shakespeare Theatre is performing in repertory with A&C using substantially the same cast. (I haven’t seen the current production of Caesar, so any thematic seeds planted in that production for harvest here were lost on me.)

Scholars believe Shakespeare wrote Antony and Cleopatra around the same time as King Lear and MacBeth. Though A&C, too, is usually counted among his tragedies, it has nothing like the tension and focus of those two more oft-performed works. Its relationship to Julius Caesar is like that of The Godfather, Part II to The Godfather: It’s at least as rich in weight and drama, but also longer, less quotable, and harder to follow, with many more characters, scenes (42, since you asked; more than any other Shakespeare play) and factions.

PICTURED LEFT: Suzanne Bertish and Andrew Long as the titular star-crossed lovers. Photo by Carol Pratt.

But the movie it really reminds me of —please, stick with me on this for a just a second — is Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Just as Anakin Skywalker, Jedi badass, gets corrupted by the Dark Side and turned into the Galaxy's most notorious mouth-breather because he can’t get a grip on his twisted love for Natalie Portman, Antony (hometown great Andrew Long of Studio’s Frozen, among other triumphant performances; yes, he’s a much better actor than Hayden Christiansen from Star Wars) grown paunchy and indolent since having survived the coup that dispatched Julius Caesar, is now “a strumpet’s fool.” And he pays for it with his life. (Sorry. There’s no crying in baseball, and there are no spoilers in 400-year old plays.)

A&C further recalls the underwhelming Star Wars finale (or final prequel; whatever) in its tedious scenes of treaty-making, and in the fact that you never quite buy the central romance that ultimately proves so destructive.

I wonder if Suzanne Bertish means for her Cleopatra to seem more in love with being in love than she is with Antony. Certainly her scenes with Long are less convincing than her scenes with her attendants (Kim-Martin Cotten and Nancy Rodriguez), after Antony has reluctantly gone back to Rome to prevent the pirate Pompey (Craig Wallace) from sacking the place. When she expresses her equine envy (“O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!”), you get that she’s one seriously randy QILF, but not that she’d die without him. Then again, that ambiguity is right there on Shakespeare's page. Cleopatra sends word to Antony that she has died; later, when he lies bleeding to death outside her chambers, she refuses to go to him. No wonder Antony’s loyal second-in-command Enobarbus (Dan Kremer) says that the Queen “beggarded all description.”

Kahn keeps the pace rocketing along, dispatching the purely expository scenes in the second half of the show as efficiently as possible so he can linger on the good stuff. Exhibit A: The gallery scene wherein Antony and Octavius Caesar (an oily Aubrey K. Deeker) celebrate their newly-made truce with Pompey by getting everyone around them shit-faced — particularly Lepidus (Ted van Griethuysen, another all-star of the District stage). Kahn and his cast knock this comic scene out of the park, and yet the audience on the night I saw the show shot dirty looks at the few people actually rewarding the actors’ work with laughter, as though the play’s sheer immensity makes it somehow inappropriate to enjoy the bits that work best.

Sidney Harman Hall is a sufficiently regal venue that designer James Noone gets by just fine with minimal sets – a table, Cleopatra’s throne – that appear and vanish from the stage's trap-door with silent precision. Jennifer Moeller’s costumes are sharp, too, especially the soldiers' armor. If there’s a relationship between which color they’re wearing and which side they’re on, I missed it. Antony’s armor is burgundy, but so is Pompey’s, while Octavius and his crew — who as fellow Romans, would presumably have the same uniforms as Antony and his men — wear black.

As Octavius Caesar, the cold pragmatist who outlives Antony to rule Rome, Deeker is believably ruthless, albeit prone to lapsing into sing-songy cadences unbecoming a leader. If recent history has taught us nothing else, it’s that heads of state who get led around by their cocks get into trouble, and that it takes a great speaker to lead a great nation. Maybe Antony and Cleopatra is a lot more topical than it first appears.

Antony and Cleopatra (about three hours, including one 15-minute intermission) is at the Shakespeare Theatre Company's Sidney Harman Hall in repertory with Julius Caesar through July 6. Tickets are available here.