‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore
It’s so delicious. And understanding that wicked pleasure, director Dexter Bullard has transformed an over-the-top Jacobean play into heavily eroticized slasher theater. Who would have thought that John Ford’s 1633 ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore could be so much fun?
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Most often directors use the gorgeous language and excessive corruption of Ford’s drama to stage an ironic morality play: the amoral greed of the Italian aristocracy transforms the story into a fable of misplaced love and tragic undoing. When Giovanni and his sister Annabella consummate their fatal forbidden passion, it becomes the one pure thing in a culture where deception and greed poison every noble family. Pregnant, Annabella is married off to a nasty-hearted aristocrat, himself the object of several schemes for vengeance that culminate in one of those horrifically ridiculous mass death scenes. Evil is vanquished; long live evil. Roll credits.
Other contemporary touches make the play even more fun. For comic relief, Bullard has made the play’s fools into facsimiles of Beavis and Butt-head. Annabella’s hapless suitor and his servant, Bergetto and Poggio, strut, stroke, and fart their way into our hearts. These characters make no sense in Ford’s play, but as played by Dominic Conti and Wesley Walker, they’re a welcome offering to us groundlings of the 20th century. Following slasher rules, they come to a bad end, their nonsense cut off by one of the subplots gone wrong.
It’s not often I get the chance in the theater to be a cynical, greedy, gore-loving, thrill-chasing groundling. But Bullard gives us more than that pleasure–which in a way pays homage to the blood and thunder of the playwright’s Jacobean world. He carefully prepares an orgy out of our own cultural circus, linking the sexuality of violence with the cynicism of capitalism. Stunningly, we get to have fun while we’re pierced by our own voyeuristic blade.
