Summary 
Innovative, oddly madcap approach to the brutal tragedy. Modernized to contemporary Washington D.C. with Titus a Desert Storm military general, the production features a televised press conference, a political fundraiser, a cable-access infomercial extolling capital punishment, and a grisly TV cooking show. Absurd, tragic, brilliant entertainment as well as biting social criticism.
Design
Directed by Christopher Johnson. Set by Martin McClendon. Lights by Richard Norwood. Costumes by Michelle Lynette Bush. Sound and original music by Sean Sinitski and Andre Pluess.
Cast
Danny Belrose (Chiron), Matthew Carter (Saturninus), Geoff Coates (Caius), Mike Dailey (Lucius), Christian Felix (Aaron), Brian Hamman (Bassianus), Anish Jethmalani (Demetrius), Tere Parkes (Tamora), Joe Roche (Emilius), Cherise Silvestri (Lavinia), Sean Sinitski (Marcus), Larry Yando (Titus).
Analysis
Defiant Theatre brings Titus Andronicus to present-day Washington D.C., infusing the tragedy with wicked contemporary politics, capitalistic excess, and the asynchronous crash of industrial punk music. Director Christopher Johnson begins the production with cracks of thunder, police sirens, and street noises as 1.1 shows rival political parties debating before a Capitol Hill audience. Five steps lead to a central platform. A presidential podium stands before a white backdrop with curtained doorways on each side. An open arch provides entrances at stage left, and steps lead to double green doors at stage right.
Amid riotous rock music, men in suits carry briefcases, protected by secret service guards in black, wearing sunglasses and wired headsets. People hold campaign signs for Bassianus and Saturninus, chanting while Stars and Stripes Forever plays on loudspeakers and a fireworks display splashes across the backdrop. The political debate and the ensuing events are covered by a long-haired, short-skirted young reporter with a microphone and her equipment-wielding cameraman. Marcus is played as a modern-day kingmaker, a red-tied power broker plying his trade before a Washington D.C. backdrop of the columns in the Mall. Less than worthy rivals, Bassianus fumbles and drops his cue cards, then scrambles and fails to speak coherently, and Saturninus primps and poses like a TV star.
Larry Yando enters as Titus, marching to martial drumming, wearing desert combat fatigues with a sidearm and a knife in a scabbard, and he carries the American flag in front of him. His soldiers follow, leading prisoners of war that include Tamora, her sons, and Aaron in orange jumpsuits, and the guards muscle the prisoners into sitting positions at the base of the center stage steps. Yando's somber Titus kneels before the flag, shuns a proffered microphone, and watches as rifle-carrying pallbearers bear the flag-draped coffin of his son across the stage. He then presides over the firing-squad execution of two prisoners, whose bodies are hoisted and dropped into an open pit at stage right.
Lavinia appears as a pop icon at a Bill Clinton fundraiser, lit in silhouette behind the backdrop, then emerging with headset microphone to belt out a torchy song in front of the stars and stripes. She sheds her light jacket, revealing a tattoo on her shoulder blade, and she dances in a furry brassiere while singing before images of the Desert Storm war. The on-stage audience claps along, and Lavinia finishes the song by dropping to her knees before Titus.
Titus refuses office, and the unctuous Saturninus accepts a ring of public duty on a purple pillow. He nearly sobs in ecstasy, foolishly waving Titus' pistol behind him and scattering his retinue. After Titus stabs his own son, the scene shifts to an upstage banquet, as tuxedo-clad waiters set a table with fruit bowls, candelabra, and champagne flutes. Characters are announced and take their seats to applause as if at a head table within a wedding reception. Lavinia and Bassianus coo and feed one another, and when a drunken and jealous Saturninus insults his brother as "Bossy Anus," a brawl erupts. Titus, in dress military uniform, calmly dines at one end of the table as the sexy reporter and her cameraman are hustled from the banquet hall. All freeze except for the red-gowned, raven-haired Tamora: in an ominous guitar-chord thrum, she reveals to the audience downstage that she seeks "a day to massacre them all."
All the preceding description is from Johnson's brilliantly conceived Act I Scene I of Shakespeare's tragedy. With an audacious approach that injects liberal doses of parody and humor into sharp social criticism, Johnson's Act I of Titus Andronicus is Defiant Theatre at its razor-sharp best. To maintain this level of entertainment and inventive power throughout the production would be nearly impossible, but Johnson and his cast and crew make a valiant effort. The Moor Aaron, wearing a black leather jacket, begins 2.1 with his bitter soliloquy while seated upon a city street bench. An advertisement for attorney-at-law Lex Maximus adorns the back of the bench, the text in Latin, and the upstage screen shows a billboard promoting the music of pop star Lavinia. Rhythmic rap accompanies the entrances of street punks Chiron and Demetrius, and amid sounds of traffic and police siren wails, Aaron halts the two punks' knife fight, standing between them with a handgun pointed at each man's head.
Moments of modernization inject the tragedy with an odd sense of humor. The 2.2 hunting trip is conducted in Eddie Bauer-style clothing along with automatic weapons, and Bassianus and Lavinia slurp from Starbucks cups while embracing each other before a backdrop of a forest. Next, a leather-skirted Tamora seduces Aaron: she wears boots and garter belts, and mounts him upstage. Then Aaron and Tamora's sons mock and taunt Bassianus and Lavinia before stabbing him and raping her. While Tamora dances carnally in exultation, Chiron licks the blade of his bloodied knife, and Aaron kicks Bassianus' body into the stage right pit.
Some of the graphic moments draw an awkwardly abundant amount of nervous laughter from the audience, but there is silence when Lavinia is pulled from the pit, naked from the waist down, bleeding from stumps, and moaning wordlessly, and in 3.1, when she is brought onstage in a wheelchair, bandaged and robed. Defiant's over-the-top theatrics have worked well with Johnson's incisive approach and the shotgun-style attack soars for most of Titus Andronicus. The horrors of 3.1, for example, are executed in a tongue-in-cheek melodrama that invites laughter. When Titus is fooled by Aaron into having his own hand severed to save his sons, his arm is pulled from the pit as a bloody stump, and the deception is revealed in a video played on the upstage screen. The video, a state-sponsored infomercial for publicly televised executions, shows a pretty nurse posing and smiling as she injects Titus' innocent sons with lethal chemicals. A stock market ticker scrolls across the bottom of the screen as if the video were from a typical public access channel. Moments later, Titus' hand is secured within a plastic bag, and the wheelchair-bound Lavinia takes the bag between her teeth to bring the severed flesh offstage. The audience squirms and titters at the image, then breaks into laughter as the onstage grief is interrupted by the ring from Marcus' cell phone. The family friend hurls the device from the stage, and his 3.1.265 line summarizes the peculiar humor within a bloody tragedy: "why dost thou laugh? It fits not at this hour." The coping mechanism of laughter in the face of horror becomes apparent as the production reaches intermission, signaled by a lounge-lizard rendition of grunge rock group Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun."
Yando, an award-winning Equity actor, graces this non-Equity production with a strong comic presence, replete with merry eyes and lunatic expressions, but he is also an articulate Shakespearean performer, the perfect choice for Johnson's and Defiant's bloody fun of a tragedy. While white-gloved waiters in tailed black tuxedoes fold napkins and pour wine, he slow-dances with Lavinia to somber classical music, silhouetted beyond the center stage backdrop. Edging toward insanity in 3.2, Yando's Titus draws a laugh with his deadpan correction of Marcus' pronunciation of "Metamorphoses." The pajama-clad Lavinia, a pen in her mouth, uses a laptop keyboard to spell the names of her attackers, the letters appearing like indictments on the backdrop.
Aaron's 4.2 murder of the nurse - "pray to the devils, the gods have given us o'er" - shocks as he shoots her with a pistol. She spins and sprawls upon the steps, and Aaron mocks her moans as she bleeds to death. He then coos to his infant son before becoming self-conscious and exiting. Johnson's 4.4 immediately follows with a surprise sequence of Titus and his friends shooting real arrows at targets offstage left. The presidential Saturninus, in khakis and a polo shirt, bounds onstage, removes a frog-head club cover from his driver in a golf bag, and tees up a golf ball. His entourage - briefcase-wielding advisor Emilius, the reporter and cameraman, and secret service agents - watch as he lines up a swing, apparently ready to drive directly into the audience. On his back swing, however, the "swoosh" sound effect from Titus' volley of arrows is heard, and Saturninus' people quickly scatter for cover. One guard falls with an arrow in his neck, another guard appears to catch one in mid-air, and the briefcase and camera bag save two others. The oddly comic moment earns spontaneous applause from the audience.
Johnson's ingenious conceptions continue into the latter moments of the play: the gift Titus sends Aaron in 4.2 is a case with nickel-plated pistols; when Lucius and his white-robed, black-masked soldiers swarm the stage with assault rifles in 5.1, the "letters" he wields are within an "Ex Fed" envelope; and when Tamora appears as Revenge in 5.2, she is a dominatrix in black leather boots, garter belts, long gloves, black gauze, and sunglasses, and her sons Rape and Murder are sado-masochists in leather, studs, chains, and masks.
As the production drives toward its bloodbath conclusion, Yando's crazed Titus sits offstage left, the handle of a butcher's knife embedded in the stump of his arm, reading recipes and chopping red meat. When Chiron and Demetrius are captured, they are thrown face down over a butcher's table, and Titus sits on the floor, his smiling face between theirs. When he slits their throats, a brutal arterial spray arcs across the stage, and Lavinia catches the flow within a silver serving bowl. Moments later, the final banquet table is set by executioners in black hoods, and Lavinia takes her seat in a short black dress and a mourning veil.
Defiant's grisly finale does not disappoint. Yando appears in a white chef's costume, and his maniacal expression elicits nervous laughter from the audience. Once he slits Lavinia's throat and serves Tamora's son's flesh in the meat pies - she spits her mouthful of food nearly into the audience - the horror begins. To the crash of punk-metal guitars, guards begin stabbing and shooting, the rapid fire of assault rifles a cacophony. Five dead bodies sprawl across the set - Lavinia, Tamora, a waiter, and two guards - and in the haze of gun smoke, a mortally wounded Titus lurches to the table, pours a glass of wine, and offers a toast to the audience before expiring.
While a nervous Emilius watches, still trying to hide behind his omnipresent briefcase, Saturninus crawls from safety beneath the banquet table. He is riddled with machine gun fire, the bloody holes visible across the back of his white tuxedo jacket. Then Emilius is executed in a hail of gunfire, his briefcase opening and documents flying as he staggers backward. When Lucius approaches center stage to address the reporter and the audience, there are eight corpses around him. After a blackout, the Star Spangled Banner plays, the American flag again adorns the backdrop, and in a disquieting final visual, a victorious soldier drops Aaron's crying infant child into the stage right trap.
The postcard advertisements for Defiant's schizophrenic Titus Andronicus feature Yando's smiling face, a bloody butcher knife, and the tag line "Eat Your Meat." Although Johnson's quick-cut directorial style does not always seem appropriate - too heartbreaking for comedy, too much satire for tragedy - the entertainment level remains extremely high, and overall the production, led by strong performances, is sometimes absurd, usually tragic, and almost always bloody brilliant.
Note: A version of this article was edited and published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Vol.21, No.2, Spring/Summer 2003.