West Coast Premiere of TITUS ANDRONICUS JR. to Open in June at Sacred Fools Second Stage

Mr. Benjamin, a recently divorced art teacher at upscale Dawson Middle School, is assigned the most unenviable task: to direct the Spring play! When he opts to mount Shakespeare's bloodiest tragedy he gets caught in a darkly comic spiral as the students supplant the teacher and he learns the toughest lesson of them all...

Titus Andronicus Jr. originated two years ago when Heard staged A Very Merry Unauthorized Scientology Pageant with a cast of young children. "After Pageant, I had people coming up to me saying I should do Shakespeare with children, which didn't really interest me. But I thought if only there were a gimmick...and that's where the idea of doing Titus popped up. I took inspiration from the pageant scenes in The Addams Family movies." But that still wasn't enough for Heard.

"The framing concept of the teacher/director suffering a nervous breakdown developed about a year later. Who else would be insane enough to attempt to stage this show with a bunch of middle schoolers than a teacher at the end of his rope. So 'Mr. Benjamin' quickly became a major character and in some ways his descent into madness mirrors General Titus's tragic decline," says Heard.

The script was given a public reading as part of UNLV's Organic and Homegrown Playwrights Festival in March and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Audiences expecting a quirky evening of children performing Shakespeare were instead given a darkly comic journey.