Stupidly, I sat in the front row.
I have this thing about going to plays and movies. I like to go in without reading anything about them.
It just so happens Titus Andronicus, playing right now at Washington Ensemble Theatre, is the gruesomemest play Shakespeare wrote. (If you’ve got some time to kill and like to read about killing, here’s the whole script of Titus Andronicus.)
Artful
The good news is, the folks at WET artfully depicted blood and gore. Red gumdrops for spilt blood, red feathers for flying blood, helmets for heads, and paper planes for arched and sprung arrows. It reminded me of improv sometimes. I love improv.
There was some great choreography, too, and some moments of comic relief with the interplay of male-female um, stuff. I guess reading about this later looking for a good image to go with this post, there was a lot of commentary about how the play is about male and female relationships, and power struggles.
Drama.
In the end, one person wrote, revenge is the great equalizer. Men and women suffer equally from painful revengefulness and stuff.
Anyway, if you go to see this, definitely sit on the side aisle or in the back. In case you decide this isn’t your thing and need to leave. I seriously wanted to in the first few minutes—they set it all up for you right away: THIS PLAY IS VIOLENT. If you’re a chauvinist, masochist, or racist, you’ll really adore it.
If you’re like me, you’ll be very uncomfortable for most of the beginning. (I’m the person who thought Scream was scary.) Then you kind of get desensitized after a little while even though it’s still bothersome. Sometimes that’s the point, though, right?
But you know? It was worth staying for to the end, because of the Plot Twist.
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