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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
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