Only Athens two and a half millennia ago bears comparison for concentrated theatric genius to Renaissance London. Shakespeare outshines his circle, but even without him that constellation — Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster, Thomas Middleton, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, and the rest — accounts for the better part of great plays written by Englishmen.
Grimmest of that sanguinary group was the dramatist captured in one telling couplet:
Deep in a dump alone John Ford was gat,
With folded arms and melancholy hat.
For years now, the play I’ve most hoped to see staged has been Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore, which ran last week at the Yale School of Drama. The play is as pungent a grotesquerie as the era produced. It’s not just the poisoning, the blinding, the burning alive, the (spoiler alert) heart impaled on a dagger, “trimmed in reeking blood” and presented at a feast; what’s most disturbing in the play is sexy incest.
‘Tis Pity is a conscious variation on Romeo and Juliet, right down to the friar friend for brother Giovanni and the comic maid for sister Annabella. Secrecy likewise is enforced on their love, but they are alone as their more sympathetic models never are, for not even the audience can embrace the siblings in ‘Tis Pity. The natural consequence of their unnatural passion leads to a sham marriage, and suspicions which prove their undoing. Menace is provided by Annabella’s deceived husband Soranzo and his cruel but loyal servant Vasques.
Ford skillfully unfurls a complex story. His verse is sober and strong, suited to express deep passion. Take Giovanni’s plea to his sister, that she embrace or dispatch him:
The love of thee, my sister, and the view
Of thy immortal beauty have untuned
All harmony both of rest and life.
Why d’ye not strike?
Annabella:
Live; thou hast won
The field, and never fought: what thou hast urged
My captive heart had long ago resolved.
Their exit a few lines later is unsettlingly hot:
Giovanni:
I would not change this minute for Elysium.
What must we now do?
Annabella:
What you will.
Giovanni:
Come, then;
After so many tears as we have wept
Let’s learn to court in smiles, to kiss, and sleep.
The Yale School of Drama’s production at the University Theater, directed by Jesse Rasmussen, uses only the stage, confining the action almost entirely to a modest platform and a plain long elevated walkway, with the audience close in on three sides of the playing area. The script is stripped back as well, with two major subplots eliminated and many remaining scenes reduced to narrative essentials. Yet the spirit and the horror of the play are preserved, in a version notable both for imaginative staging and effective acting.
Rasmussen.
The stagecraft is the flashier virtue, the effects both arresting and successful. The curtain which forms the wall behind the players is used as a screen, most memorably when the lovers descend to a bedroom set situated below the stage and their scene projected movie-size. The approach allows an intimate style of acting otherwise impossible in live theater, at the cost of a distance from the actors which theater otherwise avoids. The dialogue-free sequences at various points in the play are unusually well-handled, with the closing tableau a genuine coup de theatre. Still, I would have preferred more text and less dumb-show — especially when the lines were generally so well-delivered.
There is not a weak link in the cast, and several performers deserve special praise. The purring Putana of Patricia Fa’asua made me wish her part had not been truncated. Patrick Foley’s Friar was solid throughout and forceful when needed. Ben Anderson made the Cardinal a dignified hoot. As the wronged husband Soranzo, George Hampe skillfully applied a stylized and often comic approach to the character which proved more apt than I would have imagined. Bronte England-Nelson impressively portrayed the extreme emotional journey of the unfortunate Annabella, and paired well with the Hamlet-like Giovanni of Edmund Donovan.
But honors for the evening belong to Setareki Wainiqolo, an actor extraordinarily gifted in voice and presence. As the crafty servant Vasques, he fitted his self-presentation to the character he wished to influence, by turns charming, seductive, subservient, menacing, and commanding. The Yale School of Drama attracts the best young acting talent; I have not seen among them a more promising performer than Mr. Wainiqolo.
