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About Portland observer. (Portland, Or.) 1970-current | View Entire Issue (April 6, 2022)
Page 6 April 06, 2022 Mississippi Alberta North Portland Vancouver East County Beaverton The cast of Portland Playhouse’s “Titus Andronicus,” considered Shakespeare’s most violent play, now showing through April 10. Play Turns Violence Inside Out Opinionated Judge by Darleen Ortega What is a responsible way to por- tray unchecked violence and brutality on stage? How might wrestling transparently with that question humanize both audience members and theater makers, and help us experience the art in a new way? Portland Playhouse’s production of “Titus” presents Shakespeare’s “Titus An- dronicus” with those aims front of mind. It’s Shakespeare’s most violent play, packed with cycles of revenge that include murder, dismemberment, sexual violence, and cannibalism. The play as constructed externalizes the impacts of violence, turns violence inside out and takes it to extremes so that its impacts can better seen. This production follows Shakespeare’s logic to a metatheatrical place, confronting us with how playing and watching violence also impacts us. The story of the play involves a warrior, Titus, returning home to Rome with a van- quished queen, Tamara, as his captive. In the first scene, Tamara’s eldest son is killed in retribution for the deaths of some of Ti- tus’s sons in wars with her people. Tamara activates her lover (who doesn’t require much activating) and her two remaining sons to acts of revenge aimed at Titus, who then aims more acts of revenge at Tamara. Although the level of gore in this play is extreme, depictions of violence are com- mon on both stage and screen, and are of- ten played with abandon. I just spent three hours watching “The Batman,” for exam- ple, which is also full of elaborate gore, and my own top 10 list of movies for 2022 puts at number three “The Power of the Dog,” the story of a man who aims his tox- icity at his sister-in-law, with violent con- sequences. In the latter film, star Benedict Cumberbatch reportedly remained in char- acter on set and barely spoke to Kirsten Dunst, who played his sister-in-law, while they were filming. It's possible that working that way im- proved their performances, but at what cost? Occasionally I have asked myself such questions; when I saw “Detroit,” for example, I wondered about a white direc- tor filming scenes a violence perpetrated by white actors on Black people in a way that emphasized them as victims. Historically accurate, perhaps, but not a complete of Black experience—and what did the expe- rience of making the film cost those Black actors, not to mention the white ones? Portland Playhouse moves those ques- tions to the forefront with this production. How does watching scenes of violence im- pact audience members? What does play- ing acts of violence exact from members of the cast? This production was built with a priority around those questions. Actor La’Tevin Alexander opens the show with some instructions about how the body pro- cesses emotions like fear and trauma and anxiety, and offers some suggestions for audience members to take care of them- selves during and after the show. Reactions to the violence, including audible ones, are encouraged. Humor is employed as a tension reliever in some scenes. When a character is killed, the actor’s exit from the stage is accomplished with obvious care; often other actors will call the person play- ing the just-killed character by their given name and help them up, walking them out gently. Care was taken during rehearsals to leave the violence on the stage, and to Continued on Page 7
