Kerry Kastin, Vince Gatton, and Gretchen Egolf in Titus Andronicus at HERE, produced by the New York Shakespeare Exchange. Photo by Kalle Westerling.
Seeing Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great in December had left me with an unsavory craving for Elizabethan gore. Ross Williams’s take on Titus Andronicus for the New York Shakespeare Exchange at SoHo’s HERE Arts Center looked like an ideal excuse to return to the abattoir. Tamburlaine boasted the cutting out of a tongue, parents killing their children, virgins impaled on spears, kings bridled and yoked to a chariot, a king in a cage, two suicides in cages, and metronomic massacre. Titus Andronicus promised another severed tongue, three chopped-off hands, a father killing two of his children, a mother eating two of hers, human sacrifice, a man sentenced to death by starvation, and, yes, metronomic massacre. With luck, an entertaining Friday night lay ahead. My hopes were heightened by the program notes. There were both a “fight choreographer” and someone responsible for “violence design.” Talk of a clown was less welcome.
The plot is straightforward enough. Titus (a stolid performance by Brendan Averett), a veteran general, returns to Rome after a victorious war with the Goths. The Goth queen, Tamora (Gretchen Egolf), and three of her sons are amongst his captives. Ignoring Tamora’s pleas, Titus sacrifices the oldest in honor of his own fallen soldier-sons, setting off the cycle of revenge that consumes the rest of the play and, all too
