OFF-BROADWAY PRODUCTION
TITUS ANDRONICUS
by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
EXTENDED
NOW THROUGH MAY 3, 2026
The Pershing Square Signature Center’s
Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd Street, New York 10036
Directed by Jesse Berger
Starring Patrick Page
With Jesse Aaronson, Matthew Amendt, Blair Baker, McKinley Belcher III, Francesca Faridany, Enid Graham, Amy Jo Jackson, Adam Langdon, Anthony Michael Lopez, Anthony Michael Martinez, Howard W. Overshown, Olivia Reis, and Zack Lopez Roa
Revenge is on the menu.
Titus is Rome’s greatest general and the head of a noble family. But when his armies vanquish the Goths, their defeated queen Tamora and her lover Aaron the Moor release a fury that brings Titus, his family, and all of Rome to their knees. The play’s exploration of humankind's capacity for inhumanity is shockingly contemporary, brought to searing new life in a production directed by Jesse Berger and starring the incomparable Patrick Page as Titus, one of Shakespeare’s most demanding tragic roles.
Beowulf Boritt | Scenic Design
Emily Rebholz | Costume Design
Jiyoun Chang | Lighting Design
Adam Wernick | Composer & Sound Design
Shannon Slaton | Sound Design
Anya Kutner | Prop Supervisor
Tommy Kurzman | Wig & Makeup Design
Rick Sordelet | Fight Director & Intimacy Coordinator
Dawn-Elin Fraser | Voice & Speech Coach
Ayanna Thompson | Dramaturg
Jenn McNeil | Production Stage Manager
Gary Levinson | Production Manager
Leah Michalos | General Manager
Alexandre Bleau | Casting Director
THE CAST
RED BULL THEATER presents
TITUS ANDRONICUS
LIMITED OFF-BROADWAY ENGAGEMENT
EXTENDED | NOW THROUGH MAY 3, 2026
Performance Schedule
Monday DARK
Tuesday at 7:00 PM
Wednesday at 7:00 PM
Thursday at 7:00 PM
Friday at 7:00 PM
Saturday at 2:00 PM
Saturday at 7:00 PM
Sunday at 2:00 PM
There will be an additional 2:00 PM performance on Thursday, March 26.
Accessible Performances
ASL Interpretation | Saturday, April 4 at 2:00 PM
The ASL interpreters will be stationed house left. We recommend selecting seats in Row C and back for the best view.
Open Captioning | Sunday, April 12 at 2:00 PM
The open captions will be presented on a screen stationed house right. We recommend selecting seats in Row C and back for the best view.
Box Office Hours
The box office at the Pershing Square Signature Center will be open 2-hours before each performance.
Runtime
Estimated 120 minutes including one 15 minute intermission
Content Advisory
This production contains graphic and sexual violence, blood, loud noises, firearms, and fog/haze effects. This production of includes material that some audience members may wish to receive guidance about before attending. Red Bull Theater is presenting Shakespeare’s text as written, including content that explores humankind's capacity for inhumanity. Hover over "..." below and then click "Read More" for more detailed information and support resources. Content Guide Red Bull Theater’s production of Titus Andronicus presents Shakespeare’s text as written; therefore, this production includes depictions of and references to violence, sexual violence, murder, mutilation, racism, grief, revenge, and harm involving a child. Support Resources You can call or text 988 for free, confidential mental health support. You can also contact Safe Horizon at 800-621-HOPE (4673) for 24/7 support related to violence, abuse, or trauma.
General Discounts
From time to time Red Bull Theater makes discount codes available through such outlets as tdf.org, TheaterMania.com, BroadwayBox.com or Playbill.com. These discounts are always subject to specific terms. All ticket sales are non-refundable.
A 50% off student discount is available at the door with a valid student ID.
Group Sales
For group sales information contact Sherri at sherri@redbulltheater.com.
Phone Assistance
Should you have any questions please call the Red Bull Theater Offices Monday -Friday between 11:00 AM and 4:00 PM. 212.343.7394
Press Inquiries
For press assistance please contact David Gersten.
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THE CREATIVE TEAM
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE COMPANY
“Of all our passions and appetites, the love of power is of the most imperious and unsociable nature, since the pride of one man requires the submission of the multitude. In the tumult of civil discord, the laws of society lose their force, and their place is seldom supplied by those of humanity. The ardor of contention, the pride of victory, the despair of success, the memory of past injuries and the fear of future dangers all contribute to inflame the mind and to silence the voice of pity. From such motives almost every page of history has been stained with civil blood.”
-Edward Gibbon | The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776)
ABOUT THE PLAY: TITUS ANDRONICUS
by Ayanna Thompson
*Spoiler Alerts*
The only of Shakespeare’s Roman plays that does not have historical precedents and sources, Titus Andronicus is an original and unique play with a double revenge narrative: the first revenge plot involves Titus’s quest to avenge the wrongs done to his family by the Roman state, and the second involves Tamora, the Queen of the Goths who becomes the Empress of Rome, who seeks to avenge the “religious” sacrifice of her son by the Andronicus family. The play depicts the excesses and indecorum of the late stages of empire, which are as resonant today as they were when Shakespeare and Peele wrote the play (probably between 1589-92).
The play begins at the end of a ten-year war between the Romans and the Goths, in which the Roman general Titus loses a number of his sons in battle. Additionally, the Emperor of Rome has recently died, leaving power a vacuum in Rome. His two songs, the first-born Saturninus and the younger Bassianus, are vying to be emperor when the play begins. Although the Romans and the Goths are described as being polar opposites—civilized versus barbarous, religious versus irreligious, stoic versus libidinous—the play works to undermine these distinctions at every turn, eroding one’s understanding of what the Roman Empire actually represents. While the Goths perform horrific acts of violence, especially the rape and mutilation of Titus’s daughter Lavinia, the Romans perform equally disgusting acts, including Titus's cold-blooded sacrifice of Tamora's son, Alarbus. Likewise, Roman ideals, like the beauty of feminine docility, are turned on their heads in the course of the play, inviting the audience to ask if female decorum is that desirable.
Aaron the Moor, whose story of how he came to be associated with the Goths is never revealed, sits in the center of this dichotomous collapse, as the figure who plots violent acts and as the only figure who truly strives to protect and preserve his child. At the end of the play when Marcia, Titus’s sister, declares that Aaron is the “Chief architect and plotter of these woes,” the audience may feel conflicted about how different Aaron is from Titus and Tamora. Perhaps the Moor is more Roman than their colors, races, and religions would suggest.
For the early modern English, thinking about politics inevitably entailed thinking about Rome. If social media memes depicting American men’s obsession with the corollaries between contemporary US politics and the fall of the Roman empire are to be believed, then the same is still true today. Titus Andronicus is the perfect play for 2026 as we collectively ponder what institutions, values, and habits of being we want to carry forward in the future.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS: WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616) & GEORGE PEELE (1556-1596)
by Ayanna Thompson
Early critics of Titus Andronicus speculated that the play could not have been the invention of William Shakespeare’s or at least of William Shakespeare’s alone. While their subjective objections were based on the horrific contents of the play, later critics who were less concerned with the play’s taste, realized that there were stylistic elements that indicated the presence of two hands, George Peele’s and William Shakespeare’s. There is now widespread scholarly consensus that George Peele (1556-1596) wrote the first act (1.1) and the beginning of the second act (2.1) with Shakespeare writing most of the rest of the play. There is some scholarly debate about who authored 4.1 (the Ovid book scene), but it now appears that Peele might be the primary author of that scene too.
If Peele and Shakespeare were hired by a theatre to write Titus Andronicus together, then Peele would have been the more senior and experienced writer. The son of James Peele who had written London civic pageants and who had also written the earliest book in English on double-entry bookkeeping, George Peele was well educated, earning his BA and MA at Oxford, and well versed in the contemporary London theatre scene. George wrote several popular plays in the 1580s, including The Battle of Alcazar (1588), which has several resonances with Titus Andronicus: Senecan revenge motifs, a cannibalistic banquet, and a scheming, funny, and villainous dark-skinned Moor named Muly Mahamet.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that Peele started the play and that Shakespeare simply finished it. The cohesiveness of the thematic, allusive, and rhetorical threads in Titus Andronicus points to a closer type of co-authorship. After all, in 1592 Shakespeare would have been relatively new to London. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, Shakespeare probably had a solid grammar school education, but there is no indication that he attended university. Although we don’t have firm and clear dates, most scholars think that Shakespeare moved to London around 1585. Past scholars have wondered how Shakespeare would have known and read Euripides’ Hecuba, which is alluded to in the first act of Titus Andronicus, but it now seems clear that those passages were written by Peele and that Shakespeare learned them from Peele who had done English translations of Greek plays previously.
Shakespeare clearly carried forward a lot of what he learned and experienced co-authoring Titus Andronicus. First, he returned to the humorous, crafty, and intelligent villain in Richard III. He revisited the revenge tragedy genre in Hamlet. And finally, he reexamined the Moor in Othello, although he brilliantly separated out the crafty villain, Iago, from the valiant Moor, Othello. Although Titus was Shakespeare’s first tragedy, many facets of the play remained with him throughout his career onstage.