Maybe it’s the lousy weather. Maybe it’s the news. Whatever the case, this spring there has been a great deal of revenge drama on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus. The all-student run troupe, the What You Will Shakespeare Company, put up Two Gents, a modern-dress version of Shakespeare’s play with a sociopathic rendering of Proteus. The Armory Free Theatre saw Dr. Andrea Steven’s directorial debut with a considered and considerate The Duchess of Malfi. But the surprise runaway hit of the spring has been John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore, directed by Writers’ Theatre’s William Brown for the Department of Theatre at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Considering the college campus setting, it seems interesting that early modern plays invested in revenge and corruption are being targeted at and also successfully engaging our undergraduates.

Part of why I assigned in my “Intro to Shakespeare” class Ford’s play and arranged a field trip to see the production was so students could have a shared theatrical (not just dramatic, not just on the page) experience with which to engage one another. Their first responses were to the set design, which was indeed perhaps the cleverest part of the production with two main features. The first was the curving marble-esqe staircase dividing the stage in half. Used as a third entranceway, the staircase routinely underscored the power dynamics between characters: Giovanni begging his sister Annabella to take his love seriously, she standing halfway up the staircase, a figurative virginal pedestal; Vasquez coaxing a worried Putana from below that he will protect her despite her failure of guardianship—and then does not. Often the staircase was used to materially elevate women, put them in positions to be convinced and cajoled, only to be brutalized shortly thereafter. The staircase operated as a material reminder of the constructed nature of the dividing from and deifying of normative sexuality.

The louvered portrait also did a lot of work when it came to revealing transgressions, conscripting the audience into covert knowledge that siblings were sleeping together. Difficult to do tastefully, especially with college students, is stage nudity. There is also a strange decorousness of college theatre not run by students themselves wherein stage nudity somehow violates the “safe space” of the classroom as extended into the theatre. The morning after Giovanni and Annabella consummate their love, they talk in bed. The louvered painting is opened to reveal them chatting playfully, until they stand up to dress, when the stakes of their behavior is made clear. It is a brief visual cue that their demise, a product of this night, that the body will out. The suspended platform extending from the stairs, the collonade backdrop, and the movable louvers all evoke a panoptoconic sense: private knowledge is paramount, and as the audience, we are owners of blackmail material.

But we audiences were not the only ones conscripted into bad behavior—or at least charged with keeping secrets we’d rather not. Perhaps what I liked most about this production was the way in which it took servants very seriously, maximizing the emotional ties between elite men and their lower-class bosom confidants. It is not with women, spouses, or even kin that the young and violent men of the play share their innermost desires and fears. It is with their day-in-day-out footmen with whom the bonds are strongest, and for whom we empathize the most. Despite her blinding, Putana’s cries for Isabella who we know is already dead and yet she cannot come to believe is heart-wrenching. At the death of Soranzo, it is unclear whether Vasquez is in laughter or tears at the death of man who he has served his entire life, and whose father had stolen him into slavery. Perhaps hardest to bear is Poggio’s despair at the death of Berghetto: the blithe and dull-witted gentleman whispers the name of his servant companion last of all and several times, suggesting his importance even over the new fiancé. These are all men without leaders, without moral guides over whom they do not hold power. So while the private lives these masters and servants share is sympathetic, it is also darkly Marxist in its implications: that men need other men of equal financial status in order to be morally policed correctly, or society will devolve into just this sort of bloodbath.

Brown’s production asks us to take the ethics of the play as its core concern. Private knowledges seems to conscript and pin characters to choices they would rather not make, but no one in the world of the play has the moral backbone to upset the norm of retributive violence as a substitute for reasoned justice. As the talk back with Dr. Andrea Stevens, Dr. Valerie Hotchkiss (of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, where we have the only first edition quarto of the playtext in the world), and dramaturg Sara B. T. Thile made clear, the jumble of issues in this play—of sexuality, religion, class—often make it difficult for directors to pick a consistent emphasis as these themes fluctuate in importance depending on the scene. Morally serious drama isn’t exactly what college undergraduates are looking for in their spectacle, but challenged with the aberrant justice of the play and their own conscription into private knowledges they would rather not have, the audience was attentive and fully engaged. With two more shows left in their season, I can only hope that the Illinois Theatre Department continues to select ethically challenging work to the obvious engagement of our students.
- Illinois Theatre‘s production of ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore plays in the Colwell Playhouse at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus 5-14 March 2015.
- You can also download the program for this production here.