Tis Pity She's a Whore

The title design for American Conservatory Theatre’s Tis Pity She’s A Whore includes a bloody sword. It’s a warning to the squeamish, you may want to cover your eyes before the play’s horrific climax.

But then you’d miss Tis Pity‘s extraordinary take on Romeo and Juliet plus incest. And that would be a shame. Playwright John Ford tells his tale like a 17th-century take on Freudian drama, then packs it with plot twists, pulp romance, soap opera, swordfights and stabbings, and vaudeville slapstick. Director Carey Perloff keeps this stew boiling fiercely for 2 hours and 45 minutes, and tosses in a live score provided by composer and cellist Bonfire Madigan Shive.

John Ford wrote after Shakespeare and was among the last of the Jacobeans, staging plays just before the English Civil War shuttered all theatres. Director Carey Perloff (ACT’s Artistic Director) says she was intrigued by the society Tis Pity presents, one where civil, clerical and moral authority have broken down. But she doesn’t miss the lurid story that delivers the message.

In Parma, Annabella (Rene Augeson, an ACT core member) is besieged by suitors, good prospects and ludicrous. But she loses her heart to her brother Giovanni (Tony Award-winner Michael Hayden — what a hottie). Ford gives Giovanni a passionately eloquent love soliloquy. It’s so wrong, but he makes it sound so right.

Ford is a master of the 17th-century pick-up line. Annabella succumbs to Giovanni with the words, “Thou hast won the field and never fought.” It’s the Jacobean equivalent of “You had me at hello.”

Ford makes heroes of these lovers, even as we know they’re doomed. And Director Perloff makes it easy to fall for them. She lights them from below as if they’re angels, as brother and sister make love on a lightbox of a bed. (But it’s so wrong!)

The two are no match, though, for the schemes of the servant Vasquez, played brilliantly by Anthony Fusco. He insures that the spirited sword play and sexual romps of Act 1 are followed by poisoned daggers and bloody vengeance in Act 2.

Bonfire Madigan Shive hums and plays her cello throughout from a platform hovering above the stage. This Bay Area art music explorer, a kind of Laurie Anderson with strings, accompanies the lovers with singing tones that turn queasier and more manic as the drama proceeds.

Director Perloff has a weakness for melodrama. And the play’s action sometimes teeters into parody. But it’s a guilty pleasure. Almost everything works to boost the emotional and sexual temperature in this hothouse play. Only the set, by Walt Spangler, seems over the top. He’s designed a bizarre orgy of stylesm building a kind of church out of industrial stairways, organ pipes, and what look like curtains of Christmas ball ornaments.

Perloff and playwright Ford finish Tis Pity She’s A Whore with a strong feminist slant and a sharp attack on clerical authority. But in the end, audiences may not retrain much of those themes. They’ll be left too breathless by the bloody way Ford concludes his lover’s tale of murder and suicide.

Tis Pity She’s a Whore runs through July 6, 2008. For tickets and information visit act=sf.org.