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baked in that pie
Jun. 21st, 2014 07:54 amWe went to see this last night - and really, why not a commedia dell'arte production of Titus Andronicus? Quote from the program notes:
I mean, there were moments when I thought "oh God, no more" but then the next I was cackling with amusement. And any production where someone is credited for "blood effects" is worth seeing for that reason alone. (He usually does fight direction, and my son's taken classes with him - P. knows a bunch of people involved with this company, which is only part of why we usually catch their productions. Romeo and Juliet is my favorite so far; I believe I have mentioned it here several times.) The set was pristine white and geometrical at the start, and the actors were in all white costumes, and by the end… well, red dominated, and only Young Lucius was still unstained, until… well, I won't spoil it, just in case anyone reading this is around DC and manages to catch the last two shows in the run. They didn't spare the stage blood, is all I can say (and the laundry and the stage-scrubbing, oh my!), nor the sick jokes. But it's all done with a sort of weird sympathy and… gentleness? Honesty, at least. If not taste.
The company's based at Gallaudet University, and frequently use deaf actors; in this case both Demetrius and Lavinia were deaf, the latter poignantly so. I'd never seen Titus produced before (and am now spoiled for any other production ever), but I'm assuming the severing of Lavinia's hands is usually an afterthought to the cutting out of her tongue; in this case, obviously not, and it's Demetrius who gestures that it needs to be done. And there are several lovely moments later, when the Andronicuses (a family comfortably accommodating a deaf member) sign to Lavinia in desperate appeal, and she can't sign back. Though she does eventually manage to write her abusers' names in blood with a big stick.
And there's a lot of slapstick comedy, including juggling and dropping severed heads, and falling into pits, and oh dear, the pies. Did anyone ever take this play seriously? I doubt Shakespeare did, and I think he might well have approved of this production. While laughing his head off. Not literally. Give them a hand! Ugh.
The play is not meant to be a joke, but it is too absurd to stomach as straight drama. It is the sixteenth-century's version of Saw or Hostel.
In our darkly comic adaptation, something wicked becomes something wickedly delightful. We see the senselessness of violence--whether in warfare, sibling rivalries, or revenge--and we see the egocentric callousness with which people ignore survivors because they are too consumed with their own grief. There is nothing funny about murder or rape, but there is something absurd about the culture of violence and patriarchy that produces these atrocities. If we laugh at perpetrators of violence, it is only because we know that they don't deserve to be taken seriously. Or maybe it is because, as Titus says, we "have no more tears to shed."
I mean, there were moments when I thought "oh God, no more" but then the next I was cackling with amusement. And any production where someone is credited for "blood effects" is worth seeing for that reason alone. (He usually does fight direction, and my son's taken classes with him - P. knows a bunch of people involved with this company, which is only part of why we usually catch their productions. Romeo and Juliet is my favorite so far; I believe I have mentioned it here several times.) The set was pristine white and geometrical at the start, and the actors were in all white costumes, and by the end… well, red dominated, and only Young Lucius was still unstained, until… well, I won't spoil it, just in case anyone reading this is around DC and manages to catch the last two shows in the run. They didn't spare the stage blood, is all I can say (and the laundry and the stage-scrubbing, oh my!), nor the sick jokes. But it's all done with a sort of weird sympathy and… gentleness? Honesty, at least. If not taste.
The company's based at Gallaudet University, and frequently use deaf actors; in this case both Demetrius and Lavinia were deaf, the latter poignantly so. I'd never seen Titus produced before (and am now spoiled for any other production ever), but I'm assuming the severing of Lavinia's hands is usually an afterthought to the cutting out of her tongue; in this case, obviously not, and it's Demetrius who gestures that it needs to be done. And there are several lovely moments later, when the Andronicuses (a family comfortably accommodating a deaf member) sign to Lavinia in desperate appeal, and she can't sign back. Though she does eventually manage to write her abusers' names in blood with a big stick.
And there's a lot of slapstick comedy, including juggling and dropping severed heads, and falling into pits, and oh dear, the pies. Did anyone ever take this play seriously? I doubt Shakespeare did, and I think he might well have approved of this production. While laughing his head off. Not literally. Give them a hand! Ugh.
