- ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore
Perhaps the most unnerving thing about the American Conservatory Theater’s (ACT) production of John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore is the eerie topicality of a play that takes as its central theme spiritual and moral depravity. Ford’s leading couple, siblings Giovanni and Annabella, are in many ways an incestuous response to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, but in Shakespeare’s play the love between the two represents the possible deliverance of Verona from the civil strife of feuding families—an end that is tragically realized by the couple’s death. In Ford’s play, there is no redemption in the central pair’s union—or in their bloody deaths. While the play stages a struggle between spiritual righteousness and corporal lust, in the end, any goodness or innocence is replaced by corruption and death. The message seems to be that if one is to live in this world—in Ford’s Jacobean England or in any era—one should be prepared to come to terms with betrayal, dishonesty, vice, and horror. Even with the distance provided by the in-period costuming, contemporary resonances hovered [End Page 179] darkly over the performance. In a country divided by war, overwhelmed by daily reports of death, torture, genocide, natural disasters, and social inequality, the lack of a spiritual or moral compass that is the center of ’Tis Pity seems chillingly appropriate. Director Carey Perloff ’s production brilliantly emphasized the play’s themes by creating a dialectic between visual and auditory elements expressed through unique and effective set design and dramaturgy, and through the jaw-dropping musical contribution of cellist and composer Bonfire Madigan Shive.
If Ford’s play lacks a moral compass, Perloff ’s production offered an implicit one in the form of Shive, who was positioned with her cello on a platform above the stage, surrounded by lighted tubes resembling inverted church organ pipes. She remained there, either sitting or standing, during the entire performance. She wore a dress with what appeared to be small, angelic wings sewed onto it, and her music provided texture for each scene. The melodies, which according to Shive in an interview she gave for the playbill, were partly improvised, drew the audience along, at times lifting our attention upward. Visually and aurally, she provided a spiritual focal point for the performance. When the play turned from appalling to bloody at the marriage banquet in 4.1, Shive began to vocalize along with her cello, creating the effect of a tortured, ethereal comment on the action. As Giovanni grotesquely carved up Annabella offstage, Shive slashed the bow across her instrument and screamed—enacting the unthinkable murder taking place offstage. The performance seemed wrenched out of her, almost against her will. The effect this produced on the audience was, I think, more profound than it would have been if we had seen Giovanni actually cut up the body. For a society inured to horrific visual images, this assault on the ear evoked a deeper, gut-level reaction.
A similar technique was employed slightly less effectively to reference the human heart which director Carey Perloff identified in her Director’s notes as the “central image” of the play. In the opening moments of the play, the audience faced a dark stage and listened to the rhythmic pulse of a beating heart. For me, this touch provided a chilling foreshadowing of the final scene in which the play’s stage direction has Giovanni enter with his sister’s heart...