all photos: Page Billauer
Titus Andronicus is a bloody jarring absurd mess. At least that’s what most Shakespeare scholars think about it. Harold Bloom, who thinks Shakespeare actually invented modern human nature, said that Titus is so crazy it should be directed by Mel Brooks. Presumably Harold had never heard of Malcolm McLaren, who knew a lot more about managing scenery-gnawing self-important disasters. Titus the punk rock musical easily could have been produced in mid-80s Soho, except then it would have been dead serious, or at least less self-referential. In the performance Tuesday night at the Black Cat sometimes the self-parody almost stopped the show entirely, even as the brutal music acted like kind of fourth wall of sound, but as anyone who’s ever been hit in the head by a stage-diving dummy can attest, no pain = no party. I…. wanna be… Jacobean!
The key elements to Shawn Northrip’s version are the beers in the actor’s hands. When performers walk out on stage carrying Red Stripes and swig from them at regular intervals you have to accept that there’s not going to be a lot of suspension of disbelief going on. The most fun parts of the play were when the audience was not only reminded that the musical was happening in a bar with microphones, but when the characters actively participated in the environment: stabbing people with the beer bottles or making the crowd chant Titus! Titus! Early on when Lavinia (Casie Platt) belts out a Daddy-done-me-wrong solo her boyfriend Bassianus (our favorite self-aggrandizer Cesar Guadamuz) rocks out in front of the stage like a rabid fan. The dummy that stood in for Cesar when he had to kill one of the (many) other characters he was playing had the word “Nipples” written on its nipples.
The excellent Jason Stiles (Titus) had to ask the guitar player for help wrapping his hand after he cut it off, since by that point he was the only unmutilated person onstage. I don’t want to give anything away (though again I have no clue whether this was planned) but one of the players who got stabbed in the stab-fest at the end was definitely not in the Elizabethan play! The more the script (or lack thereof—it was pretty much impossible to tell which asides and Rocky Horroresque derailings were planned and which were ad-libs) played to the limitations of presenting something this ambitious on a tiny stage, the more the crowd got into it. If I hadn’t been sick and not drinking I totally would have started a pit, though I’m pretty sure most of the theater people around me would have burst out crying.
There were times when the off-the-cuff party atmosphere was distracting rather than amusing. The plot could be simplified without informing the audience of the cuts, for instance. It could have even been simplified further, does anyone really need to know exactly why blood gets spilled when in the end we just waiting for: “you raped my daughter, prepare to DIE!” And it was hard to tell why certain elements of the plot deserved their own songs. Stacking the beginning of the play with blasting metal-punk describing what each character is planning to do at some point does take away a bit from the energy of the final, much meatier (jokes!) culmination of the revenge. Maybe I sound like I’m being irreverent to the Shakespeare play, but I think despite all the irreverence in the adaptation, the musical remains overly faithful to its source material, which, hey, let’s be honest, makes no damn sense. And please can we all promise never to cover Fugazi’s Waiting Room ever again? The band “warmed up” the crowd with it and it had quite the opposite effect. Wouldn’t “Suggestion” be more appropriate anyway?
On the whole though Titus delivers like a live episode of Metalocalypse, primarily due to the efforts of the actors to keep a straight face through the absurdity. I wonder if Billy S. made his Roman emperor (Joe Pindelski) parade around in leather underwear carrying severed plastic heads held together by duct tape? I bet he would if he could have gotten away with it! My favorite scene in the musical is also the best scene in the original play, where Lavinia, who’s had her tongue cut out to keep her from revealing the rapists’ names, tries to communicate with her father. In Shakespeare, she grabs a book and indicates a passage from Ovid where someone was ravished in a similar way. It’s a sick, but potent testament to the power of stories to get across the most horrible truths. In an even sicker but hilarious twist, Northrip has Lavinia sing a mumbling, haunting dirge to explain herself. Her face caked in blood, she gargles out the tune as her father attempts to whistle in reply. It’s like the death aria in Tristan and Isolde mixed with G&R’s “Patience.” I.e. badass. The only thing I regret is not having a bite of what appeared to be hot pockets supposedly filled with her slaughtered children when the doomed queen (Marybeth Fritzky) passed them around. TI-TUS! TI-TUS! TI-TUS!
i think you may have underestimated us punk theater folk, there would have been no tears if you had started a pit but guess you were just too scared to try.
December 20, 2007 at 2:09 pmYou’re probably right. I was too scared to eat the Hotpocket of Doom anyway. When they threw the dummy into the first row I was assuming we’d pass it around like he was crowd surfing.
December 20, 2007 at 3:05 pmMany scholars believe that Titus was not actually written by Shakespeare. I do not know about that theory but whoever wrote it had issues. Serious issues. Like mine, for instance.
December 21, 2007 at 11:31 amI wrote it. The Bard stole it (along with pretty much everything else).
December 21, 2007 at 2:21 pm
nice review. this show was very entertaining and the actors got to party during their own performance for a change. cesar was so hammered that half way through the show he fell off the stage and got into a fist fight with two guys in the audience. he beat them badly, puked and went on to finish the show. no lie.
December 20, 2007 at 1:29 pmthe actors and shawn northrip made this show a ton of fun.