The action was never muddled.  I’d like to see a production of this play again.

That’s about as positive I can be about the Illinois Shakespeare Festival’s production of Titus Andronicus, which I saw on an amazingly temperate August night on its final performance.  The subject matter is not the source of my objections: I clearly have no aversion to theater featuring human-filled meat pies.  And while the play itself is far from perfect (the most extended moment of poetry seems to center on the capture of a fly), it’s engaging, action packed, and clearly a draft for many of Shakespeare’s later, greater works.

The primary problem with this production is a weak directoral implementation of tone.  The substance of the play is uneven, containing elements of straightforward revenge tragedy, racial politics, slasher-fick gore, and dark comedy.  But instead of finding some way to unify these disparate elements, this production plays them each separately as the moments arise, and even then, rarely well.

The problem manifests itself most clearly in the minutes before and after intermission.  Titus has just had his hand lopped off in hopes of gaining the return of his sons.  Instead, their heads (and his hand) are returned to him (in clear plastic bags, inexplicably), and the revenge plot is set in motion.  Titus gets over his physical reaction to his dismemberment too quickly.  After the initial spurt of blood and a moment of anguish, he moves on.  To be sure, the arrival of the sons’ decapitated heads would be a distraction, but a better (and better directed) actor can find a way to bring together the two strands of anguish instead of abandoning one as the newer one arrives.

This sequence should take the audience on an continuous downward slide to play’s last bloody moments — an idea well-represented by the central set piece: a sewer-like grate leading to a burial pit.  Instead, after intermission, the Andronicus family returns to the stage in bright, clean linens.  Lavinia’s face is clean and the stumps of her hands are freshly bandaged.  All the horrible momentum of the first act is lost in this shift to a bright, bourgeois family gathering. 

Granted, some time has to pass in the between acts since Tamora bears a child in the interim.  But more important than accounting for this time should be the desire to take the audience on the inevitable plunge that is dark tragedy.  It’s emotionally unsatisfying to be brought back from the edge simply because the implied timeline of the drama makes it unrealistic for Lavinia to still be bloody and smeared with dirt or Titus’ stump to still be exposed, bleeding and raw.  After all, even if their physical wounds are healed, their emotional and psychological ones certainly are not.

It seems odd to ask for a bloodier, dirtier Titus Andronicus.  The frequency and nature of the violence in the play is quite staggering.  But when the exchanges about Lavinia’s and Titus’ missing appendages are played for laughs–and not pathos–you know there’s something rotten in this Roman state.