Theater review by Adam Feldman
Rating: ★★★★ (four stars)
Revenge, in Titus Andronicus, is a dish best served family-style: In its infamous finale, a woman is tricked into eating her children. But there’s plenty of revenge to go around in Shakespeare’s early tragedy, a Roman fountain of blood so outrageously lurid and gory—and so relatively meager in poetic value—that Shakespearean scholars mostly ignored for hundreds of years, treating it as the kind of mortifying spectacle to which the only suitable response was to avert one’s eyes. More recently, however, Titus has had a comeback, viewed more often than not through a lens of ultradark slasher-flick humor. How else can you handle a play in which the title character, whose left hand has just been sawed off, turns to his daughter—who has no hands at all—and tells her, “Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy teeth”?
The multiple limb hackings in Titus Andronicus are part of a smorgasbord of grotesque recrimination that also includes adultery, murder, rape and mutilation. It is probably safer to approach such a text with comic distance and an emotional attitude that is, essentially, hands-off. But Red Bull Theater, New York’s hottest-blooded classical company, rarely aims for safety. Its stylish new production of Titus, directed by troupe leader Jesse Berger and starring the formidably sonorous Patrick Page, sustains a difficult balance instead, employing smart gallows humor but taking the fundamental stakes dead seriously.
RELATED: Buy tickets to Titus Andronicus
It is Titus, a general in late-imperial Rome, who sets off the play’s vicious spiral when he commands that the oldest son of the Goths’ captive queen, Tamora (Francesca Faridany), be dismembered and burned on a pyre. Tamora gets back at him when, having married Rome’s new emperor Saturninus (an amusingly sniveling Matthew Amendt), she arranges for her surviving sons—the smirking, track-suited douchebros Chiron (Jesse Aaronson) and Demetrius (Adam Langdon)—to violate Titus’s virtuous daughter, Lavinia (Olivia Reis), and to frame Titus’s sons for the crime. The staging of the rape scene is harrowing, and the horror of it sets up Titus’s embrace of madness and barbarism at the end of the first half. It is Titus, at this breaking point, who opts to see the whole awful situation as comedy, bursting into laughter amid severest woe. “Why dost thou laugh? it fits not with this hour,” asks his sober sister, the consul Marcia (Enid Graham). “Why,” he replies, “I have not another tear to shed.” When we see him after intermission, he has traded his crisply fascistic red-and-white uniform for the disheveled fatigues of an unhinged Patton cosplayer. (The excellent costumes are by Emily Rebholz.)
Berger’s judicious editing helps make Titus sympathetic by eliminating his early murder of his own son, which casts him as something of a murderous psycho from the start. And although Page is justly celebrated for playing villains—and recently devoted a one-man show, All the Devils Are Here, to Shakespearean ones—it’s his nonvillainy that is most compelling here; there is an underlying nobility, and a surprising tenderness, to his interpretation of the role, and especially in his treatment of Lavinia. Faridany likewise emphasizes Tamora’s maternal pain over her Jezebel-like machinations. And Tamora’s wicked Moorish lover, Aaron (a witty McKinley Belcher III), has a humanizing parental concern as well. For most of the play, he is gleefully evil, embracing the Black comedy of an outsider who has no skin in the game: a counterpart of Barabbas in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and a beta test for the seductively candid villains that Shakespeare would go on to develop in characters like Richard III, Edmund and Iago. Yet when Tamora has his child—a baby whose color gives away its parentage—even Aaron reveals a strangely powerful soft spot. That we come to care at all about these brutes is proof of how well Berger and his actors have risen to the challenge of Titus. Give them a well-deserved hand.
Titus Andronicus. Pershing Square Signature Center (Off Broadway). By William Shakespeare. Directed by Jesse Berger. With Patrick Page, Francesca Faridany, McKinley Belcher III, Enid Graham, Matthew Amendt, Olivia Reis, Jesse Aaronson, Adam Langdon. Running time: 2hrs 10mins. One intermission.
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