I had never seen or read Titus Andronicus before viewing the Julie Taymor film. While I enjoyed the film very much, I wondered why she didn't use puppetry at all (being the director of such puppetry breakthroughs as Juan Darien and The Lion King), but I did not think of this at first. I forgot all about the play until I saw a production in London. The language, the text, the words came alive on stage. The production was sparse, the acting exquisite and yet something still bothered me. An actor can not really have their hand cut off. An actor can not have his throat slit open on stage. An actor can not really die. A puppet can do all these things. A puppet with huge hands can suddenly be devoid of hands. A puppet with a huge target on its chest can be used as target practice and left in a heap on the stage, lifeless. A puppet made of sugar and a puppet made of flour can be made literally into a pie before the audience's eyes. And, of course, the use of metaphor is endless: a puppet can bleed whatever you want it to, not just stage blood, but feathers or sand or honey.

Titus Andronicus is a tightly-written play. After viewing the London production and getting my first inspirations I bought the play and got to reading. As opposed to other Shakespeare plays, Titus is extremely straightforward: there is no flowery language, no subplots or plays within plays. Only revenge, bittersweet revenge, that leaves only a few standing in the end. It also has one of the smallest casts of any Shakespeare play. All of this intrigued me and made me even more interested in pursuing a production of the play.

Titus also has amazing acts of humanity and love and brutality that you might think could not be portrayed by puppets. This is why I made the conscious choice to make the puppets quite large and as easy to manipulate as possible. I also chose not to give the puppets faces, so the audience would not view them with the same fixed expression no matter what situation they were in. It is up to the audience's imaginations to give them a face, whether they are in pain, in love or in passion. It was also a conscious decision to put forth the character's outcome in bold symbol right on their person. Their inevitable life or death is also apparent from the beginning. If they die on stage, they are a puppet. If they are alive by the end of the play, they are portrayed by an actor. Aaron wears a large hole on his chest since that will be his end, whereas Lucius wears a triumphant star as he will become Emperor. As I started to see the symbols on the puppets' chests, this inspired the entire design to take on a 60s mod style. This, in turn, inspired me to listen to British invasion music as I worked on the project, and that music is now an integral part of the production.

This will be an amazing, I hope groundbreaking, production of a play that frankly does not get produced enough. I hope you're interested in helping us along the journey to bring TITUS! to the stage.