Shakespeare With Strings (the Silly Kind) ‘Puppet Titus Andronicus,’ at the Beckett Theater

Titus Andronicus — convoluted and graphically violent as all get-out — is not generally regarded as one of Shakespeare’s better plays. This tragedy about a Roman general whose family is at odds with the Goths is a relentless parade of revenge, cannibalism and bloodletting. But its excesses lend themselves to a comic shellacking, and at the Beckett Theater, the mischief makers in the Puppet Shakespeare Players have a semi-improvised field day. The troupe’s productions include Puppet Hamlet and Puppet Romeo and Juliet, but it’s hard to imagine as suitable a candidate for sendup as Titus. The production sidesteps much of the early action (“It was mostly exposition, anyway,” says a voice-over introduction, which alerts viewers to the prospect of “puppet puke”), and soon gets right into the violence, beginning with the death of Bassianus and the rape of Lavinia. Adam Weppler makes a fittingly stolid Titus, while Sarah Villegas vamps as the perfidious, cuckolding Goth queen, Tamora. Christopher Gebauer gets off some funny deadpan reactions as Titus’s ineffectual brother, Marcus. But these actors are predictably upstaged by the many puppets, designed by A. J. Coté, who plays Tamora’s lover, Aaron (here a boar).