ALERT: 400-YEAR-OLD SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW; DO NOT READ IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW THAT EVERYONE DIES IN THIS SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY

Laughing or crying? One can never be sure. Isabelle Anderson as Titus Andronicus.

There’s a line in Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s (yeah, I’m just gonna just say this) clumsy, messy play about the Roman general with a proclivity for cooking his enemies into pastries, that I think sums up the experience of watching it as a modern audience, even when presented by a creative, smart and incredibly affordable theater company like Taffety Punk.

At some point, after our body armored protagonist has had a lot of really bad stuff happen — well, not to him, but mostly to his only daughter, Lavinia (a fierce Rana Kay), who was raped, behanded and had her tongue hacked out, and to his sons, who were executed without much of a trial or even a blink of an eye – the poor lug moans something about a need to laugh because he’s all out of tears.

Titus, you and me both. At times, this all-women play embraces that it’s working with material that T.S. Eliot famously dubbed “one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written, a play in which it is incredible that Shakespeare had any hand at all.”

And while all of the characters seem to exude either complete horridness or victimhood without interruption, some of the actors under Lise Bruneau’s direction seem to be in on the joke, like Tia Shearer, who plays the capricious, rotten emperor Saturninus as a cross between Orange is the New Black’s Pennsyltucky and the thumb-sucking Prince John in Disney’s Robin Hood, with crown and robes too big for him to fill.

Also doing nice work are Amanda Forstrom and Teresa Spencer, who as Chiron and Demetrius shrug and cackle like psychopathic hooligan white trash Beavis and Butthead, and Tiernan Madoro devotes a sort of resigned, desperate, frustrated intelligence as Aaron, the problematic (and riddled with racist stereotypes) only character of color in the play – and its evil architect.

Don’t taze me bro! (Just bake me into a pie.) Amanda Forstrom and Teresa Spencer as hooligan assholes Chiron and Demetrius.

Unfortunately, you can’t dismiss this play completely, because Julie Taymor’s 1999 film version, Titus, proves that it can be done well. Her movie is dynamic and oddly beautiful, in part because of Taymor’s skill as a director but also because film is probably a better suited medium to this piece of writing — filling in the blanks that Shakespeare left—in terms of motivation and resolution—with some fantastic cinematography. (A nice touch giving Sara Waisenen’s Tamora Jessica Lange hair at some point).

But rendered here, some actors seem to be doing the dark comedy thing, and other seem to be trying to play this straight. And unfortunately one of those trying to play it straight (though this is at times unclear) is Isabelle Anderson in the lead, who has a quality that is more like Mary Martin in Peter Pan, with her short haircut and often coolly impervious demeanor, than as a formerly great general who is alarmingly fond of filicide. (Anderson also pronounces ““Rome” like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, which was distracting.)

The production as a whole waivers between playing this on its face (as a bad play by the English language’s most celebrated playwright) and having some fun with it. I hope in upcoming performances, they begin to have more fun. I mean, the number of murders and deaths and power switcheroos in rapid succession here can take your breath away. (Or might remind you of middle school.)

Here are some scenes that I think point this in the darkly comic direction: