'Tis Pity She's a Whore

'Tis Pity She's a Whore: Plain Cutthroat Vengeance

Running Time: 2 hrs, 25 min

Jacobean tragedy -- written during the reign of James I of England, which includes the latter part of Shakespeare's career -- is a theatrical dream: rich language, bold characters, twisted plot lines, plenty of action, and lots of death. Bloody, bloody death. Even more important than all that theatrical pay dirt, buried at the heart of a good Jacobean play are political and social questions answerable only by delving deep into the souls and psyches of the characters. Furthermore, the language of these plays is dense, veering on the impenetrable. It is glorious: forceful, poetic, and replete with double and even triple meanings. The plot turns on an act, sometimes justified, often not, that demands revenge. In a superficially well-heeled society that teems with unseemliness, ordered worlds are turned upside down and the specter of inhumanity haunts innocent and guilty in a rough, chaotic dance of death. John Ford's play, unusually, doesn't start with an act that instigates a cascade of vengeance. His story concerns a brother and sister's incestuous affair. Murder may be civilly and biblically unacceptable, but incest seems to trump even murder for taking a well-ordered society and turning it on its head. It is in this desperate, decaying world that Ford has set his drama.

Reviving Ford's play is the Bedlam Faction, as smart a bunch of actors as you'll find. They take this extra-dense language and make it crystal clear; in their oratorical care, John Ford's text is accessible, the characters comprehensible, and the story relatively easy to follow. Trouble is, we're not getting the whole story. In cutting the script, the Faction has taken out all the goodness of the world. Among those left to enact this sordid tale are only sinners and scumbags. Without the foil of goodness, which the audience must hold as a mirror to the parade of wickedness, all the evil and Machiavellian stratagems are rather unimpressive. So what if everyone dies at the end? They all sucked while they were on Earth. There are no victims. So there is little sympathy for the fallen, no sense of their redemption, and the harsh beauty of the genre that makes it so tantalizing and special is lost in a night of plain, cutthroat vengeance. This, of all plays, is so much more than a revenger's play, but it gets short shrift here.

There is a larger impediment to this adaptation's successful staging: the all too evident lack of direction. The Bedlam Faction operates as a collective, with no one person taking responsibility for such basic aspects of play making as blocking. Left to their own devices, actors wander without intention. Intimate moments in a conversation occur with huge gulfs between actors. Conversely, in the superintimate theatre, there are more caricatures than characters on stage; the potential for realistic interaction is undermined by overly broad acting choices. Another choice that could have used review is in the double casting. It is a utilitarian choice, with little resonance as to why a certain pair of characters should be played by a single actor.

The entire production suffers from a flatness born of a lack of specificity. Potentially smart ideas are wasted. As admirable as it was in picking this difficult play, and as adept as this cast is in giving clarity to its wonderful words, these things are not enough to do the play justice.