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Andronicus
Reviewed by Neal Weaver
Coeurage Theatre Company at The Lyric-Hyperion Theatre & Café
Through Aug. 31
We’ve all grown accustomed to the spectacle of Hollywood filmmakers who think they can create a sure-fire hit by re-combining the elements of past hits. And young William Shakespeare, at the beginning of his career, seems to have been similarly motivated: He knew audiences loved revenge plays, so he wrote a revenge play. Elizabethans liked high-flown rhetoric, so he provided plenty of that. He knew that Thomas Kyd’s hugely successful The Spanish Tragedy featured a bloody massacre at a banquet, so he included that. Audiences seemed to love gloatingly evil anti-heroes, so he gave them Tamora, the blood-thirsty Queen of the Goths and her lover, Aaron, the murderous Moor. He wasn’t over-worried about things like sublety of motivation, and he carried every situation to the extreme. And apparently his audiences ate it up.
Nowadays, however, modern directors feel compelled to unify these wonderfully disparate elements. Will he/she treat Titus Andronicus as a gruesomely realistic essay in the Theatre of Cruelty? As the blackest of black farces? As merely grisly spectacle? No matter what the approach, there are pieces that don’t quite fit. Still, despite the over-the-top action — or because of it — the play holds more fascination for modern audiences than some of the Bard’s tidier, more conventional works. But audience response continues to be mixed: During one of the gorier scenes in this production, the audience was split: some were giggling, while others looked on in shocked horror.
Director Jeremy Lelliott doesn’t seem overly concerned with making it all make sense. He just encourages his actors to play out each scene with uninhibited abandon, and let the chips fall where they may. This may not make for coherence, but it does produce a lively show that’s never boring. (A pre-show warm-up features men of the cast, bare-chested and in Levi cut-offs, striving to out-macho each other. It doesn’t have a lot to do with the show that follows, but it provides a nerve-tingling mood-setter and a feast for beef-cake aficionados.)
As Titus, Ted Barton reveals impressive vocal resources and solid classical training. As the treacherous emperor Saturninus, Mark Jacobson emphasizes the comedy, highlighting the man’s greedy petulance, indecisiveness, and weak will. Rebekah Tripp gives us a punkish Tamora, and Anthony Mark Barrow’s Aaron is determinedly, self-consciously evil. Zach Kanner and Christopher Salazar are wonderfully sleazy as Tamora’s rapacious, murderous sons, and Kate Pelensky is stalwart and long-suffering as their victim, Lavinia. Doug Harvey is a pleasant presence as Bassianus, so one regets his being dispatched early in the action. And T.J. Marchbanks lends a welcome touch of gravitas as Titus’s son Lucius, one of the play’s few survivors — and he’s also the fight choreography.
Dean Cameron’s simple set frames the action nicely, and then gets out of the way, while Kara McLeod’s no-period costumes are a decidedly mixed bag, ranging from strikingly effective to the merely clunky.
Coeurage Theatre at Lyric-Hyperion Theatre & Café, 2106 Hyperion Avenue, Silver Lake; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m., Sun., 7 p.m.; thru Aug. 31. (323) 944-2165, couergage.org/tickets.
