Titus Andronicus 

Reviewed by Gray Palmer
Independent Shakespeare Company
Through September 2 

Whenever Titus Andronicus is produced in the literary Chautauqua atmosphere of an American summer festival (moral, uplifting, educational), there will be some wobbly parishioners who leave the campground with dry heaves, asking, “That was Shakespeare?” Yes, it was!

Think of Titus Andronicus as torture-porn. For example, (slight spoiler): Just before the act-break at Griffith Park, Titus (David Melville), his mute daughter, Lavinia (Katie Powers-Faulk), and good Marcus Andronicus (Richard Azurdia), leave the shimmering stage carrying the severed heads of two Andronici — with Lavinia holding the lopped hand of Titus in her teeth — because her own hands were cut off after she was raped in Act One.

Generations of queasy critics have consigned Titus Andronicus to a cheap sideshow on the Renaissance fairground. They’ve boarded up the entrance to this weird ride — located at a remove from the well-lit, canonical fairway — and slated the structure for demolition.

Shakespeare’s hit thriller does, at least, possess an admirable, sleek, effective design. (Roger Ebert, in his review of Julie Taymor’s movie version, called it Scream 1593.)

The theatrical project of going over-the-top is a tasty business, requiring cool calculation from the director — best served, in the case of Titus, by a nasty sense of humor. The company must find, approximately, where the “top” is located (a social calculation which will depend partly on knowledge of your audience). You vault over that mark, set the bar a little higher, do it again, then drily again and again: Preparation, approach, delay, shock — and each time, as you ratchet the bar, you insert a diversionary pause with its lyric, shimmering, shattered sensation — and then you repeat the trick at a faster tempo until you serve the meat pie.

Set in a hodge-podge, fantasy Rome, Titus has two sets of principal characters: The almost-good guys, already mentioned, crazy with schemes of vengeance; and some very bad guys, also crazy with schemes of vengeance — the emperor Saturninus (William Elsman), Tamora, Queen of the Goths (Sabra Williams), and her paramour Aaron (Evan Lewis Smith).

Blood onstage has a powerful effect and ISC’s artistic director Melissa Chalsma doesn’t pull back from the Grand Guignol of the play’s horrible imagery. But the current production has given us a strange collision of aesthetics with mixed results. First, the company uses its inclusive staging techniques of audience participation — the familiar, silly ad-libs on entrance through the audience and the charming, cheerful, “commercial” pitches before the show and at the act-break, gestures that are certainly appropriate to early modern comedy and light fantasy. But, second, and much more damaging to the grisly pleasures of Titus, the bad guys of the story are presented literally in a puppet-like fashion, as though we need to be reminded that these horrors aren’t real. (Saturninus is performed, at times, almost like a cartoon Snidely Whiplash.)

It’s as though a mechanical governor has been set on the transgressive impulse of Titus, so that the production will not operate above a certain speed, and then sections of the play have been obscured by a familiar kind of — let’s be frank — bad acting.

Even so, the many fans of ISC might be grateful for the rare opportunity of seeing weird Titus Andronicus, even in a patchy version, and look forward to more successful seasons from this excellent company.

Old Zoo at Griffith Park, near the Merry-Go-Round; Wed.-Sun., 7 p.m. In repertory with “Midsummer” — check the schedule for performance dates; through September 2. (818) 710-6306 or iscla.org. Running time: two hours and 30 minutes with intermission.