Titus Andronicus @ CHAC
You should go see Balagan Theatre’s wild west version of Titus Andronicus at CHAC, but if you want a taste of what you’re getting into before you go you should check out episode 501 of Southpark.
In that episode Cartman avenges a humiliation by arranging the deaths of his tormentor’s parents. Then he chops them up and tricks the kid into eating their corpses in a bowl of chili. Weak sauce? Cartman’s also arranged to have the kid’s favorite band Radiohead show up just after he’s eaten the chili, and when the musicians see him bawling uncontrollably after learning he’s just ingested his parents they declare him totally not cool. Cartman laps the tears from his face, “Your tears are so yummy and sweet!...Oh, the tears of unfathomable sadness!”
Pretty messed up, eh? It’s taken right from Titus Andronicus, and it’s actually not even the worst act of revenge in there. Well, maybe we’re just desensitized to it because we’ve seen it animated, but the ravishing of Lavinia is worse. “The worse you do to her the more you honor me,” (or something like that) a mother says to her sons and, well, they honor the hell out of their mother. “Honor,” maybe in quotes here. They proceed to rape Lavinia, cut off her hands, tear out her tongue, blah blah blah, and then Radiohead shows up and makes fun of her. Offstage, of course, but still. It’s almost an aggression against the audience when we have to see her later.
This Beth Peterson directed Titus Andronicus is a bit of an oddity in that regard - The circle of revenge and violence is startling at first, then borders on over-the-top, and finally continues apace for another two and a half acts or so. In the end we weren’t quite sure how to take it. Seriously? Another knife in the throat? A strong cast battered the shuttlecock of revenge back and forth to each other in a very entertaining manner, though - Lyam White was good as Titus, Curtis Eastwood was our favorite as a fop Saturninus (although that reading seems a little like it was dreamed up in the drama dorm really late at night) and Ryan Higgins is a sick fuck. And a decent Chiron. Shakespeare probably didn’t have the wild west in mind when he wrote Titus (and there’s no way he anticipated Southpark) but, revenge is revenge. Ugly and empty as it ever was.
