SOURCE: Marks, Peter. Review of Titus Andronicus. New York Times (18 August 1999): B3, E1.

In the following review, Marks admires director Terrence O'Brien's 1999 production of Titus Andronicus at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival for its innovative, stylized depiction of the play's shocking violence.

Is there any sight in Shakespeare more gruesomely loony than one that has the surviving members of a close-knit clan carting away the severed body parts of their kin? (“Come, brother, take a head,” one resigned relative declares.)

Or how about the moment in which a ravaged daughter, her tongue recently cut out, carries her father's own hacked-off limb in her teeth? Or the scene where a pair of disreputable young men are slaughtered, baked into a pie and fed to their mother?

That these all occur in one play, the around-the-clock bloodbath that is Titus Andronicus, goes a long way to explaining why the drama...