Titus Andronicus is not a good play. It is an early Shakespeare
revenge tragedy undone at every turn by the scent of parody. It’s
impossible to know whether to take this play seriously and, therefore,
very difficult to care about its characters. It’s not just that Titus has a ridiculous number of violent acts—a critic once averaged it
out to one brutality every 97 lines—but that the ridiculous
number of violent acts means that there is not much room for anything
else.
Yet Shakespeare (though some scholars say it wasn’t him at all)
tries to shoehorn in a wrenching family drama, a farce starring evil
versions of Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, a side study of race and
power, and some sexiness, too. The very unlikelihood of Titus holds a
certain fascination for makers of theater: Is it possible that this
production of Titus will finally redeem the widely derided play? And
how will we get all of that gore onstage?
It’s the latter question—the technical question—that
seems to drive the most interesting Titus rematches, including a mixed
new production at Washington Ensemble Theatre, directed by Katjana
Vadeboncoeur. Oddly, as Julie Taymor’s 1999 movie version helped to
make clear, Titus needs a strong dose of naturalism to anchor the
madness of the play’s violence, and WET’s production, while visually
elegant, is missing that basic paradoxical profundity.
Titus has two sides, essentially two mirroring casts: the straights
and the vamps. So much attention has to be diverted onto the
unbelievable action itself (the eating, say, of meat pies made of sons)
that directors and actors can forget that this play depends more on
plain old psychological realism (for half the cast, that is) than seems
plausible. Titus needs, in other words, actually to cry—otherwise
the vamping of the petulant emperor Saturninus is just a drag show.
This Saturninus (Adam Standley) does vamp, quite nicely; this Titus
(Nathan Sorseth, seeming simply over his head, and it’s hard to blame
him) does not cry.
Technically, WET’s Titus is not a revelation, but it scores on a few
fronts. The script is well-cut and the action is a brisk two hours, no
intermission. The set (by Andrea Bryn Bush) is ingenious, sort of like
a chunk of concave Colosseum wall (with rectangle boxes cut out of it
instead of arches) coated in a space-age silvery metal and divided into
halves by a steeply raked ramp in the center, adding a dash of
crucifixion. The boxes are tiny spaces of action, flat/framed
mini-rooms. Each is backed by elastic white curtains; actors have to
slip through stretchy vaginal openings to get on or off stage. (Madonna
used similar box action in her 1995 bondage-and-comics-inspired video
for the song “Human Nature.”)
As in any respectable production of the unity-defying Titus, this
one’s setting is a total pastiche. Lavinia’s gang rape and mutilation
is a modern/ballroom-inflected dance (not quite chilling enough) set to
a charming version of the jazz standard “All of Me.” (“Take my lips/I
want to lose them,/Take my arms/I’ll never use them” indeed; the
quite-good sound design is by Brendan Patrick Hogan.) Color is stripped
down to one: red. Blood and entrails are red confetti, red beads, red
chains, red bells, red glitter, cherry pie filling, a cascade of Hot
Tamales. Most everything else is white (including a couple of icy
fluorescents and the straitjacket/spacemen costumes) and silver.
Puppetry plays a role in the staging: Torture is performed by one body,
then absorbed by another, but with the two physically separated by
several feet of space. When Tamora pretends to be Revenge, she speaks
in voice-over, her speech split from her body. Power gets a neat
dissection this way and is left splayed on the stage, which seems only
right for Titus.
Some of the performances exceed their roles, especially Montana von
Fliss (champ vamp) and David S. Hogan (champ straight), but some are
too weak given how much stage time they command and how complex their
characters have to become (chiefly Mikano Fukaya and Sorseth).
But there were times, and this is saying something, when you didn’t
wonder: What was Shakespeare thinking? 
Does anyone else remember a production of Titus Andronicus from around 2002-2003 in Seattle? I went when I was in high school and it was excellent. The set design used different types of lighting to great effect, the performances were chilling, and the entire audience of high school students, deadly silent until this point, burst out in laughter during the meat pie scene: “where are my sons?” (points to pies) “there they are!” I would argue that the element of parody serves as a foil to the brutality and reinforces the layer of plebeian entertainment at the core of any Shakespeare play.
@1 Most likely Bart Sher’s production at Intiman.
What did people think about adding lines to the script I’m no Shakespearean purest but they stuck out a lot and to very little effect. Did anyone who saw the show or work on it have any insight into that?
I don’t know if I have any insight to add to the addition of lines. The modern day adlibs didn’t seem to hurt the show at all, though they certainly threw me because they were so sparse, so I wasn’t sure I knew what they were trying to say with them.
However, the addition of lines from Romeo and Juliet in Lucis’ banishment speech I found to be very bizzar. Those two scenes have nothing more in common than theme. I don’t see how those lines illuminated anything new to the show or scene. No two scenes could be more dissimilar, their times, settings, and purpose are completely different. Not to mention Lucius and Romeo are very very different characters, and serve different purposes in each show.
Did anyine else notice this?
@1: Saw it at Intiman. It was stomach-churning, in the best possible way. I took a date and she clamped down on my arm with a vice-like grip the whole time.
Indeed, it was the Intiman…and yes, it was stomach-churning, but not at all in the best of ways…who the fuck lines the proscenium with fluorescent lights and expects it to look good, let alone sound good…