‘TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE
Three and a half centuries down the line, it’s nearly impossible for a contemporary viewer to take seriously the blood-and-guts “tragedies” that so enthralled audiences in the days of Queen Elizabeth I and Kings James I and Charles I. Built on notions of “poetic justice,” plays like John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy–with their excessive gore and relentless carnage imposed on victims whose sins generally consisted of loving someone society didn’t want them to love–can’t lay claim to the sympathies of an audience whose own age records such grand-scale slaughter as the fascist Holocaust and America’s bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The playwrights of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, whether or not their hearts were really in it, sought a sense of moral order in the sufferings of their characters; our own age is far less optimistic. Works like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Marlowe’s Edward II are able to move us because of the power of their verse, but that doesn’t necessarily make their moral stances more true.
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Jesse Borrego and Lauren Tom, as Giovanni and Annabella, are athletic and sleek and loud but rather shallow. Here I confess I don’t know whether that’s what Akalaitis intended or merely was forced to settle for; in any case, it cements this constantly intriguing production’s antipassionate identity. “Art can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice!” claimed the futurists’ manifesto. While I would disagree with the statement’s sweep, there’s no denying the potency of art, such as this, that puts the world’s violence, cruelty, and injustice so coolly, so beautifully, and so inescapably before us for our consideration during, and after, the show.
