'Tis Pity She's a Whore

Even by Jacobean standards, John Ford's plays are wonderfully strange. Plots twist and coil, as revenge piles upon revenge; siblings lust after each other; and characters spontaneously expire, keeling over from shock or, even weirder, willing themselves to die, as occurs with Calantha in The Broken Heart (1625?).  She appoints an heir, sits down on her throne, and then painstakingly describes her death as it occurs.  As I said, this is strange stuff--and I love it!

Thus it was with great eagerness that I accompanied Alex to see 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (1633) at American Conservatory Theatre (A.C.T.).  The play is rarely staged, and A.C.T. used to have a fine reputation. I haven't seen one of their shows in twenty years, so this was a particular treat.

Overall, I was quite pleased.  We saw a preview, so I fully expect the minor problems with pacing, tech, and entrance cues will vanish once the production gets further into the run.  The director, Carey Perloff, made some fascinating choices.  She hired the cellist and singer Bonfire Madigan Shive (who does "punk chamber music") to accompany the show with haunting melodies and otherworldly moans and screams, a terrific effect. Shive is fully visible throughout the performance, sitting aloft on a raised platform integrated into the set. I liked too that Perloff didn't update the script by transposing it to another period. She left language intact, trusting her audience's comprehension. 

The set is semi-industrial, as seems to be the fashion right now in staging Shakespeare and Elizabethan/Jacobean plays, but for the most part it worked.  A strange series of tubes hung in a cluster from the ceiling, and tiny glass balls dotted fishing line that was also suspended throughout the space.  At first, I didn't get their significance; then I realized that Perloff and the designer, Walt Spangler, were giving us visual metaphors for blood, with the tubes signifying arteries running to the heart and the glass balls standing in for corpuscles.  These visual references are obscure but smart: blood is everywhere in 'Tis Pity, literally and figuratively, from the bodies littering the stage to the "hot blood" inflaming the incestuous siblings.

Overall, I thought the women were stronger than the men. Susan Gibney is simply fabulous as Hippolita, the sexy, wayward wife who dispatches her husband (or so she thinks) for her lover, only to have him dump her for another woman. Rene Augesen brings a complexity to Arabella, the incestuous sister, that I never saw when reading the play. While Michael Hayden does a fine job as Giovanni, the incestuous brother, he has an unfortunate tendency to swallow words at moments of high passion. His gradual descent into madness, though, is absolutely believable. I wish some of the other men were as strong. Steven Anthony Jones is downright embarrassing as the friar; Michael Fajardo phones in his performance as Soranzo; and Gregory Wallace is painfully bad as Bergetto, the foolish nephew of a wealthy citizen. I think Anthony Fusco will improve as Vasques. He strengthened as the performance progressed, always a good sign. I don't have much hope for the others.

I was pleased to see A.C.T. still going strong after nearly 45 years. It's a shame that this very smart production will just miss being superlative because of several weak men in the cast.