Attempts to Tip the Scales

In presenting the classics, directors and producers tend to foreground an aesthetic twist in their production. Dramaturg extraordinaire Anne Cattaneo, in the chapter “Deepen an Interpretation” in her book The Art of Dramaturgy, uses “Coriolanus as Stalin” as a shorthand for this inclination. Maybe this happens due to anxiety about the capacity of today’s audience for digesting older texts as-is, or a plain desire to add bells and whistles to a well-worn play. Ultimately, trying to bend a classic to one’s will is a dead end, since the classics should be instructional even outside of an academic context.

When you put all your chips on a “Coriolanus as Stalin”-style production, you end up making choices that unfortunately don’t always pay off. Even with excellent performances and design, Redtwist Theatre’s production of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, adapted by director Dusty Brown with Jordan Gleaves and Caroline Kidwell falls into the trap of assigning the production a 21st-century aesthetic without making clear why those decisions matter. I won’t pretend that Titus Andronicus is a perfect play. It’s messy, it’s gratuitously violent, and its cultural legacy is more or less built around the fact that audiences historically haven’t liked it. Producing a play as untamable as Titus encourages directors to make big choices, but problems come when those choices aren’t justified.

Redtwist’s Titus is staged in an alley formation in its cozy Edgewater home, with audience sitting on either side of a raised rectangular structure which serves as a pulpit, a banquet table, and a tomb. As the crowd files in, Caroline Kidwell, in character as Lavinia, Titus’ daughter, sings folk songs and plays guitar. Given Lavinia’s later mutilation in the play, it’s a significant directorial choice for Lavinia’s voice, aggressively stolen from her, to be the first thing the audience hears. While you may think that Lavinia’s singing would carry us throughout the production, this device never returns, a sign of missed opportunities to come.

At the play’s opening, the famed Roman general Titus Andronicus, played here by a commanding Anne Sheridan Smith, is offered the crown of Emperor by the people, which he offers to Saturninus, the son of the late Emperor. Saturninus and his brother, Bassanius, have been jockeying for the throne, and Saturninus essentially goes mad with power immediately. Titus has brought with him as prisoners of war Tamora, Queen of the Goths, three of her sons, and her Moorish lover Aaron. As Lavinia rejects Saturninus’ hand and Titus kills Tamora’s oldest son, Saturninus marries Tamora, setting off a violent domino effect, culminating in nearly everyone dying in the end.

While the play’s opening is set in the public spaces of Rome, the majority of the action is set behind closed doors, likely a motivating factor behind this production’s intimacy. This Succession-esque fly-on-the-wall quality is a stylish approach, but it raises questions. If the play is set in private spaces, why does the audience, standing in for Rome’s populace in the opening, look in on the private action? Is this meant to remark on the relationship between the will of the people and private machinations?

These questions are more complicated when the blood literally starts flying, landing on audience members who may or may not have consented to being splashed with stage blood (the good news is it washes out easily). Brown and co.’s insistence on intimacy becomes a literal obstacle in the production when actors block audience members from seeing pivotal moments of stage business. You end up with stage blood on your clothes without seeing what happened, which feels like a metaphor for the whole production.

Cattaneo uses as a test case in “Deepen an Interpretation” a production of Measure for Measure at Lincoln Center where the words “Authority… Mercy… Grace... Scope… Liberty… [and] Restraint” were scrawled on the back wall of the space. These words, recurring in Measure for Measure, were identified at the beginning of the creative process as the play’s central themes and motivated the production’s creative process. “An intriguing and memorable” interpretation of a classic play, Cattaneo writes, “is easy to define: the artists begin the latter process without a conclusion.” Conclusions or takes such as “Coriolanus is Stalin” or “Titus is Logan Roy” deprive the text of the chance to speak for itself, since the audience has to constantly link what they’re hearing to what they’re seeing.

Redtwist’s press notes refer to Titus Andronicus as being about “the politics of revenge”, a timely lens to view the play through. But since we are locked behind Rome’s gates of power, we don’t see how that affects the world beyond the palace. As Americans deal with a government seemingly motivated by spite and the world watches as campaigns of collective punishment destroy communities in Palestine, Congo, and Yemen, limit the play’s wide scope to a literally narrow setting feels like another missed opportunity.

Brown, Gleaves and Kidwell’s adaptation, retaining Shakespeare’s original text and language, smartly centers the play’s characters who both bear the brunt of the play’s violence and are sidelined and denied agency. Lavinia is still brutally assaulted by Tamora’s sons, who cut off her hands and cut out her tongue, but small directorial choices, like her wordlessly objecting when Titus speaks for her, make her more active than the text suggests. While Aaron, played warmly by James Lewis, is frequently mocked by the white Romans around him, Brown’s direction slows down for his soliloquies, and underlines his need to thrive in the political landscape of Rome. This refocusing of Shakespeare’s lens goes a long way to address Shakespeare’s Elizabethan identity politics.

Massive credit is also due to fight choreographer Michael Dias and intimacy coordinator Erin Sheets, whose work’s realism is deeply impressive given how small the space is. Unfortunately, that intimacy just doesn’t feel warranted by the text. Nor do the production’s big interpretive choices. Kidwell doesn’t sing again as Lavinia, and Aaron simply leaves the playing space at the end. Cattaneo says that, when a creative team “ride[s] the horse in the direction it’s going”, their choices will always be animated by the text. If not, then to quote a different Shakespeare play, it signifies nothing.

Titus Andronicus asks a lot of those staging it, but it also provides its own roadmap in the form of Shakespeare’s writing. It’s unfortunate that this Titus is too hopped up on its ideas, since the central conflict, of state-sanctioned revenge killings, is one that 2025 audiences are all too familiar with. Had there been a lighter conceptual hand, this production could have been the taut political thriller this aesthetic invokes. What happened instead was a confusing series of missed opportunities.