 the director, Lucy Bailey. Because I wanted to understand how she'd done something so extraordinary.
Once I came into the auditorium and the usher said, all the schoolgirls came and they all fainted.
And they're all in this box. We put them all up there. So I came in, looked in the room, and all these sort of very pale girls, all sitting there, [LAUGHS] having been fainted and being taken out. I used to say to the ushers when I came into see the show, and how many people today?
Just to be clear-- no one fell and hit their head or got seriously injured. They were simply overwhelmed. Lucy just hadn't foreseen the fainting. To give you a picture, the Globe is an open-air theater, a mostly faithful recreation of Shakespeare's original, with just under half of its audience standing close to the action on the stage. And the Globe is used to fainters-- the combination of standing and the sun probably. During Titus, when a person fainted, the ushers would wind through the crowd with an unfolded wheelchair and then take them out of the arena. Later in the run, there was a St. John's ambulance parked nearby.
It's not surprising. The blood in context and in quantity is inescapable. And it's supposed to be. Titus Andronicus is one of Shakespeare's earliest plays. And there's a lot of young man swagger mixed in with the poetry of the writing. Set in ancient Rome, the play was written to speak to some of the fascinations of the Elizabethan era. It's about war and revenge and an over-the-top grief that clouds good sense and moderation. Innocents get slain. Brutes revel in their savagery.
 It's a play that's drenched in blood. And it often gets written off as a flurry of unsubstantial bloodlettings because of that. But Lucy knew the blood mattered to the play. One of the first things she had to figure out was how to make the blood look real. In an ironic twist, to make the blood look like the real thing, they had to fake it.
If you see a lot of stage blood, it often doesn't feel very real, even if it's quite accurate, the color of blood. But blood is quite bright. And somehow that bright blood in theater terms makes you go, oh, yeah, yeah, that's just theater blood. We sort of looked at how we would make it unreal in order to make it more real. In other words, we darkened the blood.
Lucy also had to figure out how to make the blood move so it would deliver the most impact. So she turned to another expert-- the fight director.
You talk to him about if you're wounded in this way, how does the blood behave? Where does the blood come? Why is it coming out of the corner of the mouth? Why is it coming from the nose? What's the journey of the blood?
For Tamara, who the audience love to hate, there's a very careful spurt of blood when she gets a giant fork in the guts. When Titus loses a hand, there was more than one source of blood, a spurt from a syringe, then a slower ooze out of his arm. To make the intense experience more immersive, Lucy and her designer, Bill Dudley, focused on the space itself. They wanted to make it feel oppressive, make the audience participate in the blood sport.
They achieved this by giving the Globe a temporary velarium roof, which reduced the sunlight and created shadows. And then they filled the space with incense. They moved some of the action off the stage and into the crowd to create a sort of theater of chance. The idea was to make it feel like a temple of death. They have to strike a delicate balance-- too little blood and atmosphere, and you don't bring the audience along. Too much, and it feels like a parody.
It's like a huge contract, isn't it, between the audience and the play and the players. The audience, given any chance, want to believe. So as long as you do everything to suspend the disbelief, then you keep that contract. But as soon as you break that contract and do something that shows them the mechanics or overacts, overplays your cards, over-eggs it, too much blood or under-eggs it, too little blood at the moment, where they're going, sorry, I don't believe that.
And one of the places they decided to underplay happens in the very first bloodletting in the play, when Titus sacrifices Alarbus.
It happened very quickly in how we did it. And it was so fast. And then they saw the blood. And then we're pulling him, and they don't have time to dwell. So we did a very deliberate thing. We really were shocking with it.
The audience sees a flash of red, and then he's gone almost immediately. Maybe the blood made them faint, but it wasn't just the fact of it that caused them to fall. It was what was happening between the people on stage, the feelings they were experiencing. One of the most shattering moments in the play comes after Lavinia, attacked and mutilated, is brought to her father and unwrapped. The dark viscous blood seeps through the bandages at her stumps and pours slowly from her mouth. Even Titus, a war-hardened general who's done his own share of killing, is reduced in that moment to an anguished and helpless father.
His precious daughter still bleeds, and he can't stop that bleeding. 
As Titus himself says in that scene, it was my dear, and he that wounded her have hurt me more than had he killed me dead.
It's a girl who's still alive, but bleeding and causes so much internal bleeding to her father, both in the heart and the brain. So, in a way, he suffers a kind of brain bleed.
The entire play is tied together by that ribbon of grief. Parents lose children. Brothers turn on each other. Innocent bystanders are collateral damage. And all the blood is in the service of that raw feeling. The language is hysterical and violent. And it goes on for five long acts. The audience gets pulled into the hysteria because they have little choice. By the halfway point in Act Three, they're so far gone that they drop at the idea of violence.
We used to have people fainting on a word. So when Aaron came and said that he wanted one of them to chop off their hand, you could almost guarantee that somebody would faint when he said chop.
When Aaron says the word here, there's no actual chopping happening-- he's just saying it. But it was enough.
You could see the audience sort of gird themselves. And then he'd say chop, and somebody would go.
One of the things I was curious to talk to Lucy about was how it felt to be the architect of all this feeling. What was it like to do this to an audience again and again?
--their whole body, was to do with this cumulative feeling, a combination of things, not just one thing. It was such an affirmation that something about the play was working.
The audience didn't faint as much. I mean, they really didn't. And yet, everything we did was, I think, palpably the same, if not better. And I think that was because people came psychologically prepared. So it was very much harder to get that contract going that you're so involved in this that you're going to faint.
Modern theater is mostly a quiet affair-- polite applause, gentle chuckles. Usually when people leave a play in the middle of a performance is because it's bad. They're not feeling what they're supposed to be feeling. With Titus, they were checking out because they were feeling too much.
Act Four, There's No Us in Uterus-- Oh, Wait. So about 30 million Americans have fibroids. And if you don't know what this is, fibroids are these muscular tumors that grow on or in the uterus. We don't know what causes them or why they affect people of color at higher rates, especially Black people. In fact, we know so little about them that Vice President Kamala Harris introduced the Uterine Fibroid Research and Education Act last August back when she was still senator.
Almost always, fibroids are benign. Like, they don't turn into cancer. But they still cause problems-- pain, discomfort, and then there's the blood, which, of course, is what our program is about today. Fibroids can make periods heavier or longer or more erratic. Doctors can be dismissive. Surgery's expensive and carries risks. And even after surgery, fibroids can come back, new ones.
Neena Pathak went back and forth about getting surgery. Her fibroid didn't bother her at first, but over time, it grew bigger and caused more and more discomfort.  She even imagined confronting the fibroid, in the relative safety of a therapist's office, with a question-- should we stay together? She made this into a one-act play starring three characters-- woman, fibroid, and therapist. And we present now the world premiere of her play.
Well, then, let's get started. Tell me why you're here today.
Mm, like I had a choice. She dragged me here.
I'm not. I'm a fibroid.
OK. We only ever do what you want to do. You dragged me here.
Well, I'm just trying to figure out whether we should be together anymore.