June 14 – July 21, 2002

Directed by Frederíque Michel

Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe Jr.

Dramaturgy and additional text

by Charles A. Duncombe Jr.

Maia Brewton Lavinia

Katharina Lejona Death Angel, Leni Reifenstahl

Stephan Pocock Titus

Bo Roberts Titus

Paul M. Rubenstein Elia Kazan, Dark Angel, Ezra Pound

Set, Sound, Lighting, & Media Design Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.

Assistant Director Martha Duncan

Costume Design Michele Gingembre

Mask Maker David E. Frank

Light/Sound Operator Jason Piazza

Photography Rick Pickman

About The Text

Titus Tartar depicts the inner turmoil of a writer who has too often put his art at the service of the state. Titus throws in his lot with that of the Emperor and lives to experience the consequences of breaking faith with himself. Like his Shakespearean namesake, Titus is a good man who has done bad things in the service of bad people and has received a bitter reward: ruin and obscurity. Only Lavinia remains with him, the offspring of his imagination, his debased muse–a constant reminder of what he sacrificed on the altar of success. And now he rages against the power that ultimately betrayed him, and against himself for having so blithely followed it. He plots a gruesome revenge that will send Lavinia into the Emperor’s arms one last time, no longer a muse, but an avenging angel. Titus’s lament is complex: while he regrets the sacrifices made to gain entry to the halls of power, he simultaneously mourns his subsequent fall from the Emperor’s favor; he loathes himself for the things he did in the service of his ascension, yet he pines to again taste the ambrosia served at the Emperor’s table. It is a paradox that will, in the end, drive him mad.

Ostermaier’s dense, poetic text dramatizes the tormented conscience of a deeply conflicted man. The battle raging between his bestial and his human natures is reflected in the language of the play, which is both raw and heightened–hopelessly disjointed one moment, pellucid the next. Titus’s almost schizophrenic nature is reinforced by the multiple characters who stand in for different factions of his fractured psyche. The voices we hear, disparate as they are, are all the voice of Titus.

But who is Titus today? When freedoms of expression are guaranteed by law, when government officials are almost entirely indifferent to art and the creative process, what are the threats to the artist’s integrity? In the past it was obvious when an artist was prostituting his muse for the favor of his king, but the rise of the corporate state–and the entertainment conglomerate which serves it–makes the artist’s position more ambiguous.

Los Angeles is home to the self-proclaimed "Dream Factory"; from this point emanate visions of society and humanity that reverberate around the globe. It requires creativity for its existence but also homogenizes it, dilutes it, and eventually consumes it altogether. The questions surrounding a person’s responsibility for the product (or by-product) of his imagination are perhaps more vital here than anywhere else in the world. For those who do buy into the system, who pledge themselves and their invention to the machine, the line between compromise and capitulation is ever-shifting and always dictated from above. As Titus observes early in the play, "By his hands alone the slave can never become the master. Yet here, by his hands, the master will soon become the slave." So alluring are the seeming rewards that people are not just willing, but eager, to be subsumed. Is Titus’ Emperor the publisher who threatens to pulp a book critical of the current administration? Is Titus the musician whose songs sell an impossible lifestyle while ostensibly hawking lite beer? Or is he the actor who gives a friendly face and reassuring voice to a corporation that exploits impoverished workers abroad and abdicates its domestic responsibilities by circumventing our tax laws?

In his preface to the play, Ostermaier calls for the interpolation of statements from characters based on historical figures whose art served "a totalitarian or politically dubious power." The aim, in part, is to "anchor Titus’s abstract conflicts in various concrete periods of time…." He suggests names, but does not specify who these people should be. For this production we have chosen three figures from the twentieth century, two Americans and one German: Elia Kazan, the stage and film director still remembered almost as much for his friendly testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities as for his considerable artistic legacy; Ezra Pound, the poet whose vitriolic anti-American broadcasts for Mussolini during World War II overshadowed the key role he played in establishing the modernist aesthetic in American poetry; and Leni Reifenstahl, "Hitler’s favorite director," who was responsible for Triumph of the Will, perhaps the most accomplished–and chilling–propaganda film ever produced.

So we are left Titus, who describes himself late in the play as a man "who carried his art to market like lumps of meat and offered himself to the highest bidder." While virtually any creative person would like to make a living by his art, one of the fundamental distinctions this play draws is between those who sell the product of their invention and those who sell their capacity for invention itself. In the end, how responsible to the public is the artist for what he produces? How responsible is he to himself?

About The Author

Albert Ostermaier, born in Munich in 1967, is one of Germany’s most hailed young writers. He first came to prominence as a poet, publishing acclaimed volumes in 1988 and 1989. His first play was produced in 1995 and since then he has had works staged at prestigious venues throughout Germany. In 1995 he was awarded the "Liechtenstein Prize to Encourage Young Lyric Poets" and in 1997 he received the "Ernst-Toller Prize." Tatar Titus was first presented in 1998 as a part of the Autorentheatertage [Writers’ Theatre Days] in Hanover at the State Theatre of Lower Saxony. Its world premiere came in 1999 at the Nationaltheater, Mannheim.