FLASHBACK 1990: Leslie Kelen reports on the difficulties that face a Black actor in a very nasty role. 

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In commemoration of City Weekly's 40th anniversary, we are digging into our archives to celebrate. Each week, we FLASHBACK to a story or column from our past in honor of four decades of local alt-journalism. Whether the names and issues are familiar or new, we are grateful to have this unique newspaper to contain them all.

Title: The Dark Side of Personal Power
Author: Leslie Kelen
Date: Aug. 14, 1990

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Reviled for its gratuitous violence, dismissed as crude melodrama, and even questioned as to its Shakespearean authorship, Titus Andronicus, an early work of the poet/playwright, is making its first appearance at the 29th Utah Shakespearean Festival at Cedar City.

Not based on historical fact, the play relates the story of Titus Andronicus, a Roman general who returns home after completing a successful ten-year campaign against the Goths, and the calamities that befall him and his family from the moment he arrives in his beloved city.

Briefly, the triumphant Titus enters the imperial city with his retinue which includes his four remaining sons (twenty one perished in the war) and his captives: Tamora, the queen of the Goths, her three sons, and Aaron, her Moor lover and confidante. Two of Titus’ sons carry the body of a fallen brother they’ll inter in the family crypt. Prior to burial, however, a human sacrifice is required to appease the gods of the underworld, and at the urging of his youngest son, Titus selects Tamora’s eldest. The queen begs Titus not to add another wound to their already prodigious injuries, but he doesn’t listen. The queen’s son is dismembered and burnt, and Tamora, her sons, and Aaron swear to wreak vengeance on his murderers.

Though the rest of the drama is essentially an extended vehicle for depicting the Goths’ revenge and Titus’ response, or for unfolding a vicious and gory power struggle between two families, the real battle, or if you will, the conflict the play spotlights, occurs between Titus, the play’s tragic-hero, and Aaron (the Moor/African), Shakespeare’s incarnation of evil.

In pitting Titus, the penultimate soldier and patriot, against the machinations of Aaron, the embodiment of the dark side of personal power, Shakespeare juxtaposes extreme states of human consciousness. In Titus, we see a caricaturistic portrait of the socially oriented, socially defined man, for whom serving the state honorably has replaced the development of inner life. His tragedy, if it be tragedy, is that the evil he suffers at the hands of others is directly related to his inability to realize the same evil in himself. His outrageous complaints against fate, consequently, verge on self-ridicule or self-parody.

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In Aaron, in contradistinction, we witness the conscious perpetrator of destruction, the puppeteer pulling and cutting the awful strings. Aaron creates his own diabolical role and unflinchingly fulfills it. Shakespeare’s chilling achievement is that Aaron for a time becomes the conscience and consciousness of the play simply because he is its only honest figure; he is the only one capable of fully facing and admitting the ramifications of his actions.

Ken Ruta, a veteran actor, is sound as the grizzled general thrashing about in the wilderness of his pain and loss. But the most arresting performance belongs to LeWan Alexander, whose understated, cocky, and menacing Aaron is the perfect counterpoint to the blustering Titus. Alexander’s poise and precision, his spareness and elegance, is not only the antidote for Titus’ excess, but also works to sharpen and bring into focus the stark, somewhat oversimplified, but moving character portraits Shakespeare created. Robert Clendenin, as Saturninus, is lucid and effective, as is Megan Cole, who plays the Queen of the Goths, and Melanie Van Better who plays Titus’ daughter, Lavinia. The celebrated Adams Memorial Theatre, like a great beehive, is supremely adaptable to the multi-leveled entrances and exits the play requires.