The tragedy seemed so “over-the-top, it was actually pretty ridiculous,” Mac said. “We’re trapped in a cycle where conflict is created and escalated and then created again we’re chasing sensation.” Mac returned to Shakespeare’s play after Donald Trump was elected President. “Right now, in our political system, we’re living in a kind of revenge tragedy,” Mac told me over the phone on a recent morning. It premières on April 21st, at the Booth Theatre. The playwright and performer Taylor Mac decided to write a sequel. When Julie Taymor adapted the play for the screen, in 1999, she had Anthony Hopkins play Titus in a chef’s toque, a touch of Hannibal Lecter in his grin. But she survives, and, with the stumps of her arms, she points out the relevant page in Ovid to her father, who reaches for his pie recipe. The rapists in “Titus Andronicus” have read their Latin poetry, too, and so, after violating Lavinia, they also cut off her hands. Shakespeare had read Ovid’s tale of Philomela, who has her tongue cut out before being raped, and who then weaves the identity of her assailant into a tapestry. In these works, the female characters, in particular, are subjected to horrendous violence. Shakespeare, it seems, wanted to surpass in bloodiness not only his contemporary rivals-Christopher Marlowe, with his gleefully sadistic antiheroes Thomas Kyd, whose crazed avengers pursue murder and dismemberment-but also his classical sources. Two of Tamora’s sons then rape Titus’s daughter, Lavinia Titus slits their throats and has them baked into a pie and served to their mother. Titus, a Roman general, executes a son of Tamora, the Queen of the Goths, in retaliation for the Goths killing his twenty-one sons in battle. Even by the grisly standards of Elizabethan revenge tragedies, Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus” is an outlandish charnel house.
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