Theatre 'Tis Pity She's a Whore at the Loeb this weekend and next

STUART VAUGHAN'S production of John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore is intelligent in conception, a bit deficient in acting, and incredibly rich in details of staging. This Caroline tragedy, first performed at the Phoenix in 1633 by the Queen's Players, receives here an opulent mounting worthy of its subject matter an equal in quality to the Loeb presentation several years ago of Middleton's Women, Beware Women. It seemed easier then than it does now to cast a jaundiced eye on the obvious decadence of subject matter in the plays of Shakespeare's successors: the sensationalism, the fascination with sex and death, are currently such familiar features of art that audiences will surely delight to find in John Ford such a clever hand at depicting them. Writing in the strange cultural vacuum which preceded the English Revolution, John Ford took old relationships and old labels-husband, wife, virgin, brother, sister-and read into them lurid new meanings.

The setting of his story is Parma; had it been Verona the parody of Shakespeare's account of ill-starred lovers in Romeo and Juliet would have been too painfully obvious. Ford's Romeo is called Giovanni and he is played by an actor named Stan Nevin who has half of Leonard Whiting's credentials-a good physique-while lacking a strong or even passable voice for Ford's verse. Giovanni loves his sister Annabella, whose combination of wraithlike charm and physicality Lucinda Winslow succeeds very well in conveying. (Lucy Winslow, Loebgoers will remember, was superb in Dirty Hands. ) The worm of incest causes not only the ruin of two families and the death of both sister and brother, but also a few assorted stabbings, poisonings and eye-gougings which Ford probably threw in for his sensation-seeking upper-class audiences-though, then again, seventeenth-century. Englishmen assumed Italians were that way.

THE PLAY'S bawdiness and humor are over-emphasized in this production: the citizen Donado (William Fuller) could have fumed at his foolish nephew Bergetto without blustering like one of the magistrate-midgets who greet Judy Garland in the land of Oz. Geralyn Williams as Putana, Annabella's buxom attendant, is a parody, in every stagy sense of the term, of the ribald nurse. Maeve Kinkead as Hippolita-the sex-starved Wronged Woman of the piece-storms around like a steam engine out of control until releasing the last painful gasps of her already overstrained voice on a mobile platform which sucks her back into the central recess of the set. Maeve and company-a little friendly advice: don't try so damn hard.

I've held back mention of the astounding set of 'Tis Pity to the customary tag-end position such matters usually receive in reviews, though this set, designed by a talent named Franco Colavecchio who also did the costumes, is superb in every respect. Its somber facade, constructed from grayish lumber, in three tiers of Italianate colonnades, is appropriately weighty in appearance. A quick turn of some stage machinery turns left-stage quickly into Arabella's bedchamber (be careful to watch the metamorphosis in her pillow as her sin and the play's action deepen: first it picks up a red ribbon on the end, then it becomes pure scarlet); a massive crucifix lowered from the ceiling turns right-stage into the friar Bonaventura's cloister. Especially after intermission Vaughan makes very effective use of the traditional alcove at center stage which he has opened and closed for ceremonial processions and deftly lighted tableaux.

THE staggering power of the scene in which Giovanni stabs his sister Annabella is due to a vaulting funnel effect achieved through intense turquoise lighting of the higher recesses of the set above her bed. Shades of rose, violet and pale turquoise give way in the lighting of the last scenes to the wild-set and dark-set of hues. If Ford's themes foreshadow Sade, Poe and Nabokov, the combined effect of Colacecchia's set and Jonathan Miller's lighting evokes the same sense of demented, striving sensuality found in the eighteenth-century etchings of Piranesi.

'Tis Pity She's a Whore in this presentation is the work of the Loeb's "first visiting director." Vaughan's excellent directorial effort, hopefully, will encourage the Harvard Dramatic Club to extend similar invitations in the future. Shedding some of their provinciality in the process, the usual retinue of Harvard dramatic talents have come up here with an entertaining, visually delectable staging of a difficult play. If you're ever going to see a Loeb play, see this one. The costumes, the set and an unearthly masque in the second act are splendid surface externals in a play which shows all human convention to be hollow, all human interaction mere shadow-boxing in a game which, through lust, ends in hellfire.