DramaLit Blog 1.0: BU School of Theatre

I found this article on the guardian that is super interesting — and it reminded me a lot of this past round of shows. Thinking about “a good stage death” made me think a lot about Titus especially, and how the way deaths can totally take the audience out of or keep them right in the show. And I just have to say that something about Titus that I really really enjoyed was that I feel like the production didn’t try to disregard the absurdity of so much blood and death. Not all of the deaths seemed “realistic” to me, but I feel like if Christine and all the actors tried to do that, they would have lost me. Sometimes I feel that the harder the production tries to make the death look real, the more stupid they make themselves look. Theatre is creative, acting is creative, so why can’t we be creative when a character dies!? I just so appreciated that Titus seemed to embrace, acknowledge, and really go for it when it came to the plethora of onstage deaths. The characters’ lives ended in a very Shakespearean feeling way, but the execution of the death and the symbolism that followed made all the difference. It reminded me so much of the revenge tragedy “Death of a Salesman” group, where I was partly laughing out of discomfort and shock, but just as horrified and moved by the deaths happening all around me. As Alexis Soloski says in this article, “By eschewing the conventions of realism, Van Hove delivered a stage death more poignant and persuasive than any number of studied judders and convulsions.” PREACH.