Behind the Arras

Director’s Notes…on Titus
by David R. Gammons

Spectacle & Blood
Like Shakespeare’s own audience, I was initially drawn to Titus Andronicus for the promise of spectacular, violent bloodshed.  In his day it was his most popular play, bespeaking an Elizabethan taste for the gruesome and gory.  We are all compelled to witness man’s capacity for cruelty; we are shocked but perversely satisfied to see that which is meant to stay inside come out into the light.  We alleviate our own darkest fears and desires by seeing them played out on stage.  In my research, I turned to the paintings of British artist Francis Bacon for examples of figures in sharply delineated space that seemed to represent the inside and the outside simultaneously: the viscera as the spectacle.  

Tears & Stones
The longer I lived with the play, the more fascinated I became with a different bodily fluid – tears.  I am deeply moved by the grief in the play, the compassion, the throbbing ache of loss and despair.  At the true heart of the play, we find Titus, prostrate with grief, weeping into dust and unyielding rock.  Lucius says, “You recount your sorrows to a stone.”  Confronted with his maimed and ruined daughter Lavinia, Titus exclaims of her, and of Heaven: “Then must my sea be moved with her sighs / Then must my earth with her continual tears / Become a deluge, overflowed and drowned.”  This is a world where men must cry, a rocky landscape forever wet with an unending tide of tears.

Sacrifice & Ritual
Titus Andronicus asks us to consider what we are willing to sacrifice, and why.  The play opens with an ostensibly religious ritual -- the sacrifice of a prisoner of war to appease the war dead.  This single act unleashes a torrent of revenge and retribution that will require further sacrifices: political, emotional, and bodily.  Will we sacrifice our honor?  Our loved ones?  Our own flesh and blood?

Brotherhood & Betrayal
Family structure is essential to understanding the world of Titus.  Every central character is linked to another by the unbreakable bond of blood.  These ties provide opportunities for both brotherhood and betrayal.  How does one honor one’s bloodline?  Where does allegiance lie?  

The Body & Architecture
This production is site-specific: Shakespeare’s poetry and the actors’ bodies and imaginations are in a dialogue with a physical architecture.  The process of finding a space was an arduous journey.  On a site visit to a local boxing club I witnessed men gathering to explore a physical language that transcends speech and taps into primal instincts, organizing man’s inherent capacity for violence into a structure that reveals the natural beauty and meaning of our brutality.  Here at The Garage, we descend into the earth to discover an organic and man-made landscape filled with a dangerous geometry of obstructions and openings.  

“A Wilderness of Tigers”
Shakespeare employs a stunning range of animal imagery in Titus: exploring the interplay between savagery and civilization, populating the world with characters who struggle to align their moral compass with their baser animal instincts.  When Lucius is banished, Titus consoles him by saying “Rome is but a wilderness of tigers.”  It is a dark wood teeming with elegant predators and ferocious, mysterious monsters.

“This Unhallowed & Bloodstained Hole”
The hole is a central image in the play: a tomb, a trap, a wound, an orifice.  Shakespeare works this sexual and violent image relentlessly, allowing the landscape and the body to mirror each other: surfaces are penetrated and we experience a vertiginous free fall.  

Hands
Shakespeare uses the word “hands” – or a linguistic variant – nearly 80 times in the play, more than any other single word image.  Hands are a symbol of agency, representing both the power to harm and the capacity to heal.  Hands maim the flesh, but they also wipe away tears.  Hands reach out, seeking human connection.  And because Shakespeare belongs to all of us, we trustingly put the play into your hands – the audience.