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Ross Williams, the company's founding director, has given the production a tattered carnival-of-horrors setting (designed by Jason Lajka), with tents to the sides and a large light-up bullseye sitting upstage center. The bullseye, which lights up and flashes red and white at various points during the performance, reminds us that anyone can become a target of violence in a place where civilized behavior is a thin veneer that is easily torn asunder. This Titus opens with the cast members meandering onto the stage to perform a prologue that Mr. Williams has appended. Someone starts a game of tag, which begins slowly but quickly escalates in intensity, accompanied by a high-volume recording of My Chemical Romance's apt ditty Mama ("Mama, we all go to hell"). It isn't long before calls of "you're it" turn to violence. As each cast member is stabbed, choked, or shot to death, a character dressed as a clown (Kerry Kastin) yanks on a noose-like rope, sending a gusher of dried corn, representing blood, banging loudly down a chute and into a large galvanized tub. The tone is set. That corn will see a lot of action over the next two-and-a-half hours. Titus (an imposing Brendan Averett) is a Roman general who has recently returned triumphant after a ten-year battle against the Goths. One of his prisoners is Tamora (an outstanding Gretchen Egolf), Queen of the Goths, who is hell-bent for revenge after Titus orders her eldest son executed despite her pleas for mercy. Tamora plans carefully. She begins by building up her standing by marrying the new Emperor of Rome, Saturninus (Vince Gatton), and then she goes about hatching her plot with her even-more-vengeful lover Aaron (Warren Jackson). Aaron, a black man whose motives we can only guess at without bringing in too modern an interpretation, represents evil incarnate, someone who declares: "If one good deed in all my life I did/I do repent it from my very soul." This is the pair that Titus is up against. It should come as no surprise, then, that the revenge plot includes the rape and dismemberment of Titus's daughter Lavinia (Kate Lydic) by two of Tamora's sons, and the framing of Titus's sons for the murder of Saturninus's brother Bassianus (Adam Kezele). But don't write off Titus. He can be as vengeful and bloodthirsty as his enemies, as the unfolding plot and the rising body count reveal. Through all of the carnage, the cast ably handles the rhythms of Shakespeare's language so that the various characters and plot twists are not at all difficult to follow. Given the deluge of news we are routinely bombarded with about real-life violence, the play does lend itself to modern renditions. However, the director and the cast do not impose one or interfere with Shakespeare, but have wisely and successfully focused on the task of engaging an audience by telling the story that he set down.
Titus Andronicus
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