Such audacity, Cleveland Shakespeare Festival! Like a kindergarten class staging the chainsaw scene from Scarface, Titus Andronicus stuns and stupefies its audience, burying its lilting iambic pentameter under a mound of dead bodies. Instead of young Romeo wooing lovely Juliet under the balcony, Titus Andronicus trots out characters who rape, sever off hands, rip out tongues, toss bodies in pits, bury a character alive, behead two brothers, slowly and drippingly slice throats, and—the pièce de résistance!—grind down the bones of two sons and serve them to their mother in a pie. Hmmmm. Because of this carnage and moral chaos, most parents don’t read Titus to their little kids: “Oh, Daddy, please tell me that cannibal story again!”
Intrepidly, the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival tackles this impossible-to- stage play. Give them thunderous kudos for selecting a play which no one recognizes, a play which would get me fired from my high school teaching job, a play that even inveterate Bardophiles wish would simply go away. In fact many acting companies, fearing rock-throwing demonstrations from PTA folks, steer Titus on a farcical tack, replicating the mood of Monty Python when the Black Knight, getting all four limbs chopped off by King Arthur, says “It’s only a flesh wound.”
Cleveland Shakespeare, however, plunges down the other path—the straight path, the path of gore and nausea, the blood-splattering, no-apologies path that Elizabethan audiences loved. A couple years ago, when I first read the play, I slapped myself and muttered, “You’ve got to be kidding me. Shakespeare wrote this?” So bracing myself for the violent worse, as though the Visigoths awaited me atop the Millennium Force, I sweated my way towards LCCC, that night’s Cleveland Shakespeare venue. Minutes into the play, however, my gag-reflex tract calmed down because, after all, it’s not reality nor a movie–but a play. Lavinia’s severed hands resembled ketchup-stained gloves, and the severed heads of Titus’s sons were probably borrowed from Macy’s mannequin department. So instead of a concatenation of cheap thrills, a Saw gore-gush, the play expertly explored the themes of a father’s indomitable love for his children and—befitting our times—the mutually destructive nature of revenge.
Before commenting further on the play, a word about the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival. Just when my Cleveland life seemingly was spiraling down the sludgy drain of despair—the betrayal of LeBum, the Tribe’s lassitude, the (No!) dumping of little, ankle-turning rocks on my favorite valley running trail—along came Cleveland Shakespeare, its very first name exuding civic pride. I know nothing about this group except one thing: they are, by and large, young people, amateur actors who speak mellifluously, remember impeccably, flit about the stage acrobatically. And they do all this outdoors, with sirens blaring and babies mewling and crows kamikazing. How can these actors concentrate? It must be like performing surgery in a hurricane.
Because Cleveland Shakespeare performs outdoors, changing venues around the area every weekend for seven weeks, the actors are subject to the whims of the weather. Whenever the winds carry the spit and splatter of rain, the crew must pack up the set and scurry indoors: this is what happened during the Sat 7/24 performance of Titus at Lorain County Community College when the company relocated to a small, indoor theatre. This Plan B captured the quintessential grit of Cleveland Shakespeare because audience members- having searched for the outdoor venue- wandered in throughout the first thirty minutes, and then with ten minutes to go an entire row left early. Professional to the end, the company soldiered on. Now the play itself. There’s a reason why this play is rarely produced: it’s an absurd bloodbath, as irrational and relentless as a cockfight, in which Titus kills Tamora’s son and Tamora kills Titus’s sons and then Titus kills Tamora’s other sons. Let’s be honest: it ain’t Hamlet contemplating the meaning of life. Four dead bodies lay scattered at the end, and since I wanted to slay the entire row for leaving early, there might have been more.
Bad Shakespeare, however, is better than almost anything else, and so I immensely enjoyed the performance. This production clocks in at 1:40, a good hour, mercifully, thus getting lopped off. Unlike most Shakespeare plays, this one is easy to follow, the plot being overt and actors enunciating the words so beautifully. Because of the abundance of outdoor light, I always cheat at the Cleveland Shakespeare: I bring the text and follow along, reveling like a puppy on a sunny lawn at the precision and dulcet clarity of the actors’ memorized lines. Towards the play’s end, when Allen Branstein as Titus keens forty lines about his family’s decimation, I marveled at the drumbeat of his salient words, at the undulations of his cadences, at the controlled rage of his voice. How can humans memorize hundreds of Shakespearean lines? When my wife asks me to pick up a red pepper, Half-&-Half, and turkey off the bone at Heinens, I return with green onions, whole milk, and Fiddle Faddle.
Cleveland Shakespeare Festival is also presenting The Merry Wives of Windsor, a comedy notable for the return of Shakespeare’s greatest comic character: Sir John Falstaff. Cleveland Shakespeare Festival’s final Titus performance is Sat 8/7, 7PM, at Kulas Stage at Wade Oval, and the final Merry Wives performance is August 8, same time, same place. I urge everyone to walk, bike, drive, pogostick, rickshaw, hot air balloon it to Wade Oval for the final performances. For crying out loud: IT’S FREE. If you like the show, then toss in some money, if not, nothing lost—except that you spent two hours, outside, bathing in the sunset glow, with the world greatest playwright. http://www.CleveShakes.org
Review by Joe Toner