Tie a red ribbon Two Lights conveys convincing horror BY MEGAN GRUMBLING
	TITUS ANDRONICUS By William Shakespeare. Directed by Michael T. Toth. Produced by Two Lights Theatre Ensemble, at the St. Lawrence, through July 24. Call 207.775.5568.

Even before Two Lights’ production of the grisly Titus Andronicus begins, its director can’t wait to pique our own reflections on violence. While we seat ourselves at the St. Lawrence and peruse the program notes, a series of questions is projected onto the backdrop, à la the standard pre-show trivia we’re accustomed to seeing at the movies. These start inanely enough — "What is the most common name given to pet goldfish?" — but soon become more pointed, more topical to the gruesome tragedy we’re about to witness. "When were you in your first fight?" the script on the screen asks. "Where are your scars?" "What do you hate?" The conceit is one of several with which Director Michael Toth has wrought an audacious, brazenly political production of one of Shakespeare’s earliest and most horrific works.

On the backdrop, the questions yield to an overture of projected film and video footage, calculatingly fraught modern images. We see a baby, a mushroom bomb, Nazi youth, American soldiers in Vietnam, the World Trade Center collapsing, ground forces in Iraq. The accompanying audio is almost unbearably piercing; we hear strafing, explosions, the sounds of structures and people disintegrating. Provocative and a touch didactic, Toth’s measures set us up to experience Titus’s vengeful grotesqueries viscerally, in the conscious context of our own lives, modern history, and America’s current mission abroad.

And then the story begins, and we are in an ancient, historically amalgamated Rome, built of decrepit marblesque platforms. Roman general Titus (Tom Crutcher, in a performance dominated by anguish) has just returned from a decade of warfare against the Goths, during which he has lost all but four of his 25 sons. He has captured the Goth Queen Tamora (the steely Karen Ball) and her three sons, the eldest of whom he executes in standard Roman revenge ritual.

When Tamora winds up married to the dodgy new Roman emperor Saturnine (the prim-yet-volatile Richard O’Brien, from whom it is hard to look away), she’s in a position to wreak all sorts of reprisals, assisted by her lover/servant Aaron (the outrageous Steven Leighton), a hateful and conscienceless Moor. (Leighton is Caucasian, and liberties with henna have thus been taken to "color" his character, to mixed effect.) Tamora and her no-good sons Chiron and Demetrius (the excellent, punk-ass Jesse Leighton and Ian Carlsen, who nonetheless should beware of burying lines) have all set their sights on the ugly ruin of Titus’s only daughter, Lavinia (portrayed rather vacuously but with convincing horror by Patience Goodwin). And that’s only the beginning of a sequence of bloody events that includes hacked-off hands, heads, and tongues, as well as a chilling rape.

Two Lights’ Titus takes a highly stylized approach to this bedlam, with rich results. The supposedly civilized Roman officials are clothed in fine Western suits, and their speeches to the masses, from behind a marblesque podium, recall State of the Union addresses. Titus’s soldier sons, in grey and black with chest holsters, resemble FBI sharpshooters. The barbarous Goths, on the other hand, are punked out. Tamora wears black fishnets and leather, and her two sons — Chiron in leather pants and killer chained boots; Demetrius in suspendered plaid pants and red Doc Martens — could have walked out of A Clockwork Orange or the East Village circa 1973. This is also a very aural production, with a bold range of musical accompaniment (from techno to jazz ballads to the Copeland "beef song," when things turn cannibalistic) and the syncopated stomps of imperial approach made pointedly audible long before entrance.

But the signature motif of Two Lights’ stylization concerns representation of wounds: Each slash is represented by a garish red ribbon hung at the point of mortal entry. The climax of this effect — and of the play — comes during Lavinia’s rape, during which she is affixed with scarlet garlands at the mouth and nether regions, and is fitted with elaborate satin mitts. The action of the rape scene is genuinely disquieting, accompanied by industrial house music and paced by Carlsen’s frightening speed-freak twitching and grins. Though here the ribbon motif becomes a bit of a burden (Carlsen and Leighton actually have to pause in the ravishing to tie on all Lavinia’s wounds) the scene blurs the sick thrill of a slasher flick with the gnawing horror of credible drama, and it is both engrossing and very hard to watch.

Toth’s ambitious Titus brings its violence closer to us by way of modern allusion, distances it with stylization, and makes us reel from the cacophony of those very effects. In doing so, he asks us to consider not just the play’s more obvious modern political parallels, but our own reactions to images of brutality. The several severed tongues of Titus play at a human inability to articulate the extent of our collective atrocities, and our nation and age, surely, are uniquely blasé and naive about violence. The finest measure of Two Lights’ bold production is that it succeeds in expressing that horror.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com