So Titus Andronicus, you may have heard, is by far Shakespeare’s bloodiest and most visceral play, featuring such fetching sights as a handless, tongueless woman scratching the names of the men who mutilated and raped her into the dirt with a stick. That said, it was wildly popular in Shakespeare’s time, and has a lot to recommend it if you have any stomach for violence and don’t mind getting down into the muck once in awhile. (T.S. Eliot, famously, refused to do so, calling Titus ‘one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written’, but he was a sour man of foul disposition, so never mind him.) It’s still staged quite infrequently, owing to its complexity and to the rigorous violence, but it’s starting to be seen a little more often, here and there. The Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre’s current staging, however, is a little different. It uses puppets. Lots of them. (FULL ARTICLE: Toby Zinman, Philadelphia Inquirer)