My high school theater director often regaled us with one of my favorite Shakespeare stories of all time: At the Globe Theatre in London, he stood with hundreds of other theatergoers to watch Shakespeare’s foray into the slasher genre with Titus Andronicus. As the blood began to pour onstage, he recalled audience members dropping like flies.
Disappointingly, Cincy Shakes’ production of Titus Andronicus is nowhere near as bloody. Nonetheless, director Jeremy Dubin crafts a successful horror show experience by orchestrating several moments that are exceptionally difficult to watch.
Some allege that Titus Andronicus is one of Shakespeare’s most tawdry ventures. A tragedy, it is certain to end in heartbreak. But how necessary are each of the steps he takes to push his characters over the edge?
Originally set in ancient Rome, titular character Titus Andronicus is the city’s star general. Upon his return from war with the Goths, Titus brings back as captives the Queen of the Goths, Tamora; her lover, Aaron the Moor; and her three sons, Alarbus, Demetrius and Chiron.
To avenge the death of his own sons lost during the war, Titus sacrifices Tamora’s eldest son, Alarbus, setting off a cycle of revenge between the two that ends in bloodshed. So much bloodshed.
Tamora is played with delectable spite by Miranda McGee, who positively oozes sex in her cut-out Steampunk dresses and displays meticulous patience and cunning.
Maggie Lou Rader is Tamora’s perfect foil in her portrayal of Lavinia, Titus’s beloved daughter who suffers a terrible fate at the hands of the Goth queen. Perhaps the most riveting — and viscerally uncomfortable — scene in the entire production is the confrontation between the two, which ends with Tamora ordering her two remaining sons, Chiron and Demetrius, to rape Lavinia as she begs for mercy.
It’s a difficult scene to watch, particularly as Rader fully embodies the pure panic and absolute despair imaginable from a woman in those circumstances.
Even more difficult, though, were the obvious and painful attempts made by both Shakespeare and director Dubin to bring levity to the following scenes in order to lighten the mood. Some of this is done successfully; after all, Titus Andronicus, at its core, is a very dark comedy, and the cast has masterful deadpan deliveries.
But there is something ironic in Cincy Shakes tackling Titus Andronicus during ArtsWave’s Season of the Woman. Yes, at the center of this play is a very strong woman — Tamora — who employs every last bit of cunning and spite to seize power and enact revenge on the man who has wronged her. But the horrifying acts of violence committed against Lavinia effectively work to cancel that message out.
It’s not “girl power” to direct such violence against another person, let alone another woman. Tamora knows that Lavinia is Titus’s property, and “soiling” his property is her only motive.
Following the scene of Lavinia’s rape, I took a few moments to look around at the audience. The actions committed against Lavinia are so profoundly disturbing that not one woman was eager to be amused for the remainder of the act, a mood that hovered over the audience until intermission.
Little to no action is taken during the remainder of the play to give Lavinia back her agency. Shakespeare’s works are notoriously light on stage directions, and there are ample opportunities to “flip the script” on Act 2’s overall tone.
Coupled with this confused take on how a show like Titus Andronicus thematically plays into the concept of the “Season of the Woman,” the production was designed with a Steampunk concept.
Though anachronistic in nature, there seemed to be little motivation for the play’s selected period, other than that it looked exceptionally good. Dubin, along with set designer Justen N. Locke and sound and projections designer Douglas J. Borntrager, conceived and executed a devilishly clever concept through use of vaudevillian projections throughout the show.
Though an interesting theme is interwoven into the work itself, Cincy Shakes ultimately failed to bring any meat to the concept, which left the production feeling somewhat hollow.
Titus Andronicus runs through Nov. 2 at the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company. More info/tickets: cincyshakes.com.
This article appears in Oct 2-15, 2019.
