Carte Blanche’s “Titus Andronicus” a dish best not served

I so wanted to like Carte Blanche Studio’s Titus Andronicus. It sounded great: Shakespeare’s first tragedy, his most violent play and his most maligned, marketed as the Elizabethan equivalent of a Saw film. But Carte Blanche managed just a handful of shining moments in a Titus that is inconsistent and lackluster overall.

The play itself didn’t seem to blame. Titus is not in the same class as Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, but the gruesome tale of two families waging wars of revenge upon each other offers enough action and drama to keep us engaged.

The cast waxed and waned throughout, sometimes as sharp as their daggers, sometimes tarnished and blunt.

Frank Burke, playing Titus, veered between brilliant and sloppy moments. His discovery of the maiming of his daughter Lavinia (Anna Jeanette Figlesthaler) is anguished and heartbreaking, but it seems like a fluke coming just minutes after an uninspired monologue in which he pleads for the lives of two of his sons. And while I understand the difficulty of pretending to have on hand instead of two, Burke’s tendency to keep using the fingers of his “stump” after cutting off his left hand was irksome, to say the least.

The women, Figlesthaler and Laura Holterman, as Goth queen-turned-Empress Tamora, were better.

Lavinia is perhaps the play’s most tragic character; she loses her tongue, hands and virginity. Figlesthaler skillfully walks the line between shaken, broken victim and avenger charged with mute fury. A similar mix of victim and fury boils in Holterman’s portrayal of Tamora, whose eldest son Titus has killed. But Holterman/Tamora finally shuns victimhood and becomes a charismatic and vicious villain.

Christopher Weis, as Marcus, stumped me. For the whole first half of the play, his reaction to the tragedies unfolding was no reaction. In a line midway through Titus, he refers to himself as “cold and numb,” but blank is more like it. Even after Weis warms Marcus some in the second half, he lacks feeling.

More generally, the production lacks the gravity that would give purpose to the play’s blood and gore. The final climactic fight scene is over in the few moments the cast takes to move to where you can’t see them getting “stabbed.” Some of the earlier murders in the show sparked inappropriate laughter.

I doubt that the Carte Blanche team is intentionally playing up Titus’ worse elements. There wasn’t enough tongue-in-cheek delivery to indicate such cleverness, and occasional strong moments suggested serious intent on the part of the cast and director Jimmy Dragolovich. I’m sure they mean Titus to be a bloody Shakespearean revenge play, not a send-up of a revenge play.

But they’ve done the Bard no favors here. Titus ends with a hideous dinner, and this rendition leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

Carte Blanche Studio’s Titus Andronicus will run weekends through June 19, with 8 p.m. shows on Fridays and Saturdays and 6 p.m. shows on Sunday. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased online or at (414) 305-9102.