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.
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Good Night, Oscar North Coast Repertory (9/16-10/11) |
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Much Ado About Nothing McCadden Place Theatre (8/07-8/16) |
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6 Out of 10 Theatre 68 (8/20-8/20) |
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After the Blast The Broadwater Second Stage (8/05-8/13) |
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Catch Me If You Can Colony Theatre (9/17-10/18) |
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Emily Skinner: In Concert Feinstein's at the Nikko (8/14-8/15) |
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Gershwin and the Golden Age Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for the Performing Arts (The Soraya) (10/11-10/11) |
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John Lloyd Young Feinstein's at the Nikko (8/21-8/22) |
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Love, Loss and What I Wore Sawyer's Playhouse (8/08-8/30) |
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Our Man in Santiago by Mark Wilding Odyssey Theatre Ensemble (9/10-9/20) |