the heart of the matter

As you can tell from the previous entry, I did a little prep work, not having read the play in many years, before going last Thursday to ACT’s production of John “Not the Film Director” Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. So I can report that the production is extremely faithful and complete, and I’m glad I went despite the inane chatter during the performance of the two senile harpies behind me, though that wasn’t the only reason I felt a bit unfulfilled by this Whore.

I actually would have been OK with some judicious trimming, not so much because of the running time (though I’m as tired of pointing out the stupidity of starting a three-hour show at 8:00 on a work night as I always am the next day; no wonder audiences tend to be students and retirees, who can sit and enjoy their incest-murder-revenge dramas without thinking about the looming 8:00 a.m. cubicle the next morning) as because the comedy scenes . . well, they take the person of a doofus foolish suitor named Bergetto, and though Gregory Wallace performs him well –the acting throughout ranges from solid to excellent – the character is such a bizarre zany, so clueless and – can I just say mentally challenged? – that the longer he’s on stage the more inexplicable he becomes, so that when an attractive young woman (Philotis, but I’m going to keep plot summaries and character relationship diagrams to a minimum here, because you’d be better off spending the time it would take you to read the complicated summaries and explications in just reading the play) wants to marry him you can’t possibly figure out why. A little of this sort of character goes a long, long way; I’m faulting Ford, not the performance.

Much of his humor is of the robustly bawdy sort (“I like his codpiece!” announced the woman behind me, the more egregiously offensive one, in the Pepto-Bismal pink jacket, and here I might as well compliment the periodish costumes by Candice Donnelly, who no doubt would have done wonders with Pinkie behind me) so beloved of busty serving wenches at Renaissance Faires and English majors who want to play dirty without dirtying themselves. I will freely admit that I have an addiction to even the grossest sexual puns myself, a fault (if fault it can be called) which I attribute to a lifetime of reading Shakespeare, but can I just say without getting all Dr Bowdler here that I’m tired of the whole “bawdy humor” thing? It gets too coy and precious, and over-emphasized, when it should be obscene, and just one element among many. Seriously, rent some porn and yank it out of your system, and then maybe we could perform pre-Victorian works without the constant nudge-wink emphasis on all the naughty bits, and place a little more emphasis on the poetry and philosophy. But of course the audience chuckles at every hip thrust, in case anyone thinks they didn’t get it, and I just think of Polonius, who is for a jig or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps.

I’d say that “of course” (of course, you should always beware of a statement that follows of course) ‘Tis Pity survives for its tragic scenes, but I’ve come across (or overheard) a surprising number of theater-goers who assume it’s a comedy (apparently on the theory that “whore,” being one of those above-mentioned bawdy terms, is inherently comic), so I guess we live in a world – and I ask you, what kind of world is this? – in which even veteran audience members don’t realize this is the tragic tale of Giovanni (Michael Hayden), his sister/lover Annabella (Rene Augesen), and her husband Soranzo (Michael Earle Fajardo). Most of the poetry and philosophy are supplied by the brother and sister, which is one of the elements that unites them against those around them. High praise to all three leads for capturing the quicksilver intensity of this triangle.

The blithering hags behind me mentioned (during the performance, of course; some insights just can’t wait) that it was very Shakespearean, which is true enough; there are Shakespearean echoes throughout, and though some, like the comic rundown of the suitors by the saucy maid, seem like standard theatrical devices that we only remember thanks to Shakespeare, some echoes are just too specific: watching the troubled philosophy student Giovanni grapple with his incestuous yearnings amid the comical parade of various unlikely suitors is like seeing Hamlet dropped into the wooing of Bianca.

So I was basically enjoying the performance very much, admiring the actors, particularly the three leads, and admiring the multi-level unit set, hung with strings of large iridescent glass beads and twists that lent a slightly tawdry yet dazzling air to the shifting scenes, yet feeling that somehow it wasn’t quite catching fire for me, when we came to the end. Everyone I’ve ever talked to who has read or seen this play always remembers one thing (maybe I should put in a spoiler alert here, just to be nice, though the point I’m about to make is that this memorable one thing doesn’t happen in this production): at the denouement, Giovanni enters with his sister’s heart, which he has cut out, impaled on his knife. In this production, though Giovanni kills the pregnant Annabella as required (and though the program notes made much of the literal and symbolic role of the heart in this play, and how the play was written shortly after Harvey’s discovery of the heart’s role in the circulatory system), they shied from the final tragic grotesquerie, and Giovanni’s pointed remarks about Annabella’s heart lost their literal meaning. In short, Ford and his play walk sublimely off a cliff, and director Carey Perloff and ACT declined to follow.

I can’t really blame them, even if it meant they didn't go quite as far out as the play demands. There was enough clueless laughter (which is different from nervous or unnerved laughter) during passionate or ironic moments to make me think a large portion of the audience would have just lost it if Giovanni had been walking around with his sister's heart on his dagger. Perloff said something I really liked in her “From the Artistic Director” letter in the program: “. . . ‘Tis Pity is one of those big meaty classics that are disappearing from the stages of the American theater, as both our economy and our attention spans constrict. As the American theater seems to move closer and closer to television realism, it is thrilling to reconnect with a classic work that is truly theatrical, poetic, ambitious, complex, and metaphoric. So we feel incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to explore one of the great plays of the 17th century [OK, here comes the part where she loses me] with one of the great audiences of the 21st.”

Look, I understand she needs to say that, but I’ve sat in too many local audiences to think that we have the great audiences that great theater deserves, or even that deserve great theater. The two women behind me, obviously regular theater-goers, are too typical of the breed: blithely chattering (despite being shushed several times), too oblivious to everything but the rusty clanking of their own brain-gears, too smugly pleased with their own status as theater-goers (yet identical in their reactions to any of the much-scorned television audience), too quick to offer opinions instead of to pay attention.

Years ago I read that Joseph Conrad said of his art, “Above all, I want to make you see.” I thought that was sort of obvious, but over the years I’ve realized that this is one of those remarks, like “Love thy neighbor,” whose simple surface conceals a maddening, endless and endlessly ambiguous imperative. Nothing is harder than just seeing what is happening accurately and, while maintaining concentration, withholding your own judgments until the end, when you can separate the wheat from the chaff. No wonder so many religions condemn the theater while stealing its best effects; both are in the business of making you above all things pay attention to the elusive underlying. This may seem like a heavy burden to lay onto, for example, Feydeau farces, but there are all sorts of degrees here, and the comic is as worthy and exalted as the tragic.

So I walked out feeling like Savonarola, disgusted at the unworthiness and frivolity around me, but what he burnt as vanities I wanted the crowds to worship as our closest simulacrum to truth, or at the very least to admire as some sort of justification for humanity’s continued existence. I applauded the actors as they deserved, and then hightailed it out of the profaned temple before I turned around to the babbling lumps behind me and said or did something I wouldn’t regret.