A round of applause, please, for the hardest working stagehands in New York City: the clean-up crew at the Red Bull Theater’s production of Shakespeare’s salute to carnage, Titus Andronicus. The show is playing at the Signature Center’s smallest stage, the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre, yet it’s amazing how much (fake) blood splatters all over the place.
They have to mop up pools of it during intermission, because Titus (Patrick Page) impulsively amputates his hand, tricked by the queen’s servant/sidepiece Aaron (McKinley Belcher III) into believing he could exchange it for his imprisoned sons. Oh, he gets his sons…his sons’ heads on a platter. And that comes after an earlier, even grislier, amputation: Titus’ daughter, Lavinia (Olivia Reis), is raped by a pair of petulant Goth princes, Chiron (Jesse Aaronson) and Demetrius (Adam Langdon), who chop off both of her hands and cut out her tongue.
There’s an even bigger bloodbath in the second half, most notably when Titus strings up Lavinia’s assaulters by their feet like farm animals before giving them the Mrs. Lovett meat-pie treatment. Kudos to the, ahem, baker, who managed to make the filling look like oozy human flesh.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★☆☆ review here.]
If you’re wondering whether to laugh, cry, or cringe, you’re not the only one. Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy and one of the least-produced plays in his canon, is a mess—literally and literarily. T.S. Eliot famously called it “one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written.” (What might Shakespeare have made of Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats?) During the Act 5 dinner-party scene, Page’s Titus emerges wearing a toque, a crisp white chef’s jacket (which doesn’t stay white for long), and a deranged grin that’s part magnanimous host, part Marvel villain. He looks like he’s about to stab someone, or sing “Be Our Guest.”
Titus, a Roman general—costumed by Emily Rebholz to look more than a little like a Nazi—returns after leading his troops to victory over the Goths. He’s carrying the remains three of his sons, who died in battle, as well as a group of Goth POWs: Tamora (Francesca Faridany), their queen; and her three sons, Alarbus (Blair Baker), plus the aforementioned pastries-in-waiting. As thanks for his military service, the Romans want Titus to take over as emperor; Titus demurs, tossing the crown to one of the late emperor’s sons, the spineless Saturninus (Matthew Amendt). And when Saturninus decides he wants to marry Lavinia, Titus readily agrees, plucking her from the arms of her betrothed, Bassianus (Howard W. Overshown), Saturninus’ brother. But the wind changes direction, and the capricious new emperor decides to marry the Goth queen instead. Someone should have counseled Saturninus against sleeping with the enemy.
A few of director Jesse Berger’s choices are inspired—e.g., portraying Chiron and Demetrius as beer-pounding, tracksuit-wearing, back-slapping frat bros who are so odious that you’ll be counting the minutes until their well-deserved murder and mutilation. You might be surprised to discover that Titus has a sister, Marcia (a wonderful Enid Graham); usually it’s a brother named Marcus. It’s a smart, sympathetic switch, especially considering that Marcia is the one who discovers the bruised, bloodied Lavinia and brings her to her father. And when it comes to Shakespeare’s villains (or heroes), it’s tough to do better than Page, who’s played just about every Shakespeare villain and hero there is to play, not to mention the devil himself in Hadestown.
The production runs about two hours and 20 minutes. The question that remains: How long do we think it takes the crew to clean up after the climactic killing spree?
Titus Andronicus opened March 29, 2026, at the Signature Center and runs through April 19. Tickets and information: redbulltheater.com
