The production of John Ford's Tis Pity She's a Whore that opened at the Public Theatre the first week of April, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis, is surprisingly engrossing. Like the production of "Pericles" that Michael Greif directed earlier this season, it features a company of capable actors, two able stars, a consistent vision of the play and a couple of tour-de-force performances from actors in secondary roles. The stars in this instance are Val Kilmer and Jeanne Tripplehorn, who play the siblings Giovanni and Annabella -- Giovanni being the young man who, against some of the best advice in Jacobean tragedy, enters into an incestuous relationship with his sister at the beginning of the play and, at the end of it, appears at a banquet with her heart on a stake.
Mr. Kilmer, who played Jim Morrison, the lead singer for The Doors, in Oliver Stone's movie of that title, also played a rock star in one of those Abrahams/Zucker spoofs. An actor like that, who knows how to play a rock star's temperament -- whether in earnest or in jest -- as opposed to one who merely possesses a rock star's temperament (like the young actors in the Brat Pack school), isn't a bad bet to play a Jacobean revenge hero. Callousness and a deceptive air of durability are the key here, for Giovanni is Hamlet without a conscience or an intellect. Watching him in the grip of something larger and stronger than himself, we have to believe that he thinks he is in control.
In the case of Annabella, we have to believe that she could go from thinking incest unthinkable to thinking it no big deal, and in very short order. If Annabella is too degenerate or too simple, her seduction will fail to be interesting, and that's why it isn't a bad idea, either, to cast an actress who knows how to play a victim without playing a sap. Miss Tripplehorn, who appears in the controversial date-rape scene in the new slasher movie Basic Instinct, and who got browbeaten and slathered with Vaseline in the last John Shanley play at the Public, manages to seem both intelligent and vulnerable. Watching Mr. Kilmer come on to her, you feel that if he were your brother you'd put out, too.
Unlike Mr. Kilmer, Miss Tripplehorn has trouble with the poetry, but she makes intelligible a particular brand of female naiveté, which the play, especially in Ms. Akalaitis's production, proves to be about. Yes, Jacobean revenge tragedy amounts to little more than a seventeenth-century version of Basic Instinct, but even cheap thrills command a subtext, and Ms. Akalaitis's production suggests that the subtext of Ford play is the phenomenon we call sexual harassment -- the process by which predatory men prevail with woman by trading on the very customs and laws that make women feel safe.
In Ford's play, women of all sorts (vulgar, innocent, elegant, corrupt) are turned against and punished for allowing themselves to be seduced -- punished by the very men who lured them into their beds or their confidence.
What this production skillfully brings out is that Giovanni's seduction and murder of Annabella -- the play's paradigm for feminine trust elicited and betrayed -- has more to do with sexual politics than with sex.
Ms. Akalaitis has updated the play to the Fascist Italy of the nineteen-thirties, to create the sense of an ossified, decadent, and repressive moral order, and in dealing with the violence she has opted for all-out realism, which is the only way to approach these plays. John Conklin's scenic design employs an idea of art-through-the-ages: a system of de Chirico archways, in which characters can eavesdrop or take shelter from the rain sculpture fragments -- a foot, an armless statue--that prefigure some of the violence scenes in the Mannerist style appearing aloft behind a scrim a Dadaist design on the cyclorama and here and there, surrealist distortions of humanity.
I liked Eric Avari's Alan Rickman turn in the Iago role, and Deirdre O'Connell's Putana and Ross Lehman's Bergetto--particularly the way their performances marshalled contempt, affection, and pity. Less popular with me were the dumb-show wedding at the beginning of Act II and the poisoning scene -- two sequences that find Ms. Akalaitis up to her old pseudo-avant-garde tricks (twitching and slow-mo). I could also have done without Jan A. P. Kaczmarek's incessant electronic music and Daniel Oreske's Mussolini impression, and without Jared Harris, who plays Soranzo -- or anyway, without his bluster and mannerisms and speech impediment. And Ellen McEldufff's portrayal of Hippolita as a raving, scheming villianess -- which is how she is described -- seemed at variance with Ms. Akalaisis' insightful interpretation: the whole point is that what the men say of the woman and what we see of them are two different things.