Palpable Pain

Since moving to the Shenandoah valley, I have become a Shakespeare junkie.  

Shakespeare had never really been my thing, until I found myself living 20 minutes away from the Blackfriars Playhouse, the world's only recreation of Shakespeare's indoor theater. I went to see The Christmas Carol, which they perform every year in December, but my world wasn't rocked until I saw Cyrano de Bergerac in May. Ever since then, I find myself drawn to this theater whenever I have a free night.

The acting is outstanding and I often find myself moved to hysterical laughter or gut wrenching tears, sometimes in the same show. Shakespeare didn't write his plays to be read in classrooms, he wrote them to be performed on stage, and I think it is impossible to approach understanding of his brilliance until you have seen his work incarnate.

This afternoon I attended a performance of Titus Andronicus, which is said to be Shakespeare's bloodiest, most violence work and is very rarely performed. The feeling I sat with throughout the entire show was: pain. Gut-wrenching, want to tear your heart out pain. The pain was palpable on the stage and even in the audience, where all of us were affected by the depth of grief, hatred, and evil that almost every character exuded.

Theater is a powerful medium because unlike film, a theater goer is a participant, a part of the story that is being told. It is very difficult to remain aloof or apart from live performance, especially at the Blackfriars, where the actors intentionally draw the audience in and make us part of the play's world.

So I walk away from the theater today feeling a deep sense of loss and grief in the pit of my stomach. Having witnessed the evil that comes from revenge, which is the basic plot of this play. Having seen the ways that cycles of violence only beget more violence, pain, and destruction. To think that this entire tragedy might have been stopped by the forgiveness, the pardon of Titus at the very beginning. And yet, Titus found it necessary to uphold the practice of retributive justice, let the punishment fit the crime.

I will not come to see this show again, though it was brilliant. I don't think my heart could take it. I come away with my heart broken by the way that a lack of forgiveness can give birth to pain and destruction beyond compare, without end.

May we learn to forgive.