One Concept, Two Directors — Stephen Legawiec

When I was at the American Repertory Theater, way back when, Joanne Akalaitis was slated to direct John Ford’s Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Akalaitis had directed for the ART before, most notably, the notorious production of Endgame, which Beckett sought to shut down. (See my previous post on that.) And now she was about to go into rehearsal for this Jacobean tragedy. (technically, a Caroline tragedy because Charles was on the throne, for all you theatre nerds out there.)

“Tis Pity,” as we call it, is kind of a Romeo and Juliet story, if Romeo and Juliet were brother and sister. This tragedy of blood was written in 1633 and concerns a brother and sister (Giovanni and Annabella) who have an incestuous (but loving) relationship. Annabella’s father is trying to marry her off to some really repellent suitors, who only want her for her money. And of course, there is no way for her to be with her brother, whom she truly loves. She becomes pregnant by her brother, is forced to marry someone else, and then their secret comes out. It ends bloodily.

In discussing the play, critic Michael Billingham says, “What is unsettling, in the end, is Ford’s refusal to either condone or condemn incest: he simply presents it as an unstoppable force.”

Fun trivia: When Robert Brustein produced the play in at the Yale Repertory Theatre in the late 1960s, a New Haven newspaper, too uptight to print the correct title, continually referred to the play as “Tis Pity She’s Bad.”

JoAnne Akalaitis in 1990
Photo by Martha Swope ©The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

So Joanne Akalaitis was scheduled to direct his in May of 1988. The play was to be set in 1930s Fascist Italy and costumes were made, sets were constructed, and the play was cast. Then, for some reason, just as rehearsals were about to begin, Akalaitis left. Fired? Quit? Artistic differences? Unforeseen conflict? I don’t know. But suddenly and mysteriously, she was out.

And Michael Kahn was in.

Michael Kahn was the hardest working director in regional theatre at the time. He simultaneously had three jobs. He was the artistic director of The Folger, He was the artistic director of The Acting Company, and he was the head of Drama at Juilliard. And he came in to direct this, which had nothing to do with those three institutions.

I was intimately acquainted with this production because Kahn had asked me to select music for the show. Well, OK, he didn’t know me. But he told the ART that he wanted someone qualified to select music and somehow, I was the guy. (I was the artistic intern there.) I can’t remember if it was because of my musical background, or if Kahn just walked into the front office and said, “How about him?”

Jeremy Geidt (Florio) and Pamela Gien (Annabella), center
Courtesy of the American Repertory Theater / Photo: Richard Feldman

So I met with Kahn and compiled music that would accompany the scenes, like a film score. I selected Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, some Astor Piazzola, and other pieces. And then they were edited by the sound designer, Steve Santomenna, OLD SCHOOL. That meant that everything was recorded onto large reel-to-reel tapes and it was edited with a razor blade and scotch tape. Music was sliced apart, rearranged, and taped back together. There was no digital at the time. At least not at the A.R.T. The razor blade was the state of the art.

Thomas Derrah, Ed Shloth and Pamela Gien.
Courtesy of the American Repertory Theater / Photo: Richard Feldman

It was thrilling to be a part of that production, creatively. Derek Smith and Pam Gien played Giovanni and Annabella. The show’s beautiful black set was designed by Derek McLane, and period costumes were designed by Catherine Zuber (both were subsequently Tony winners for their designs on Broadway)

Derek Smith and Pamela Gien
Courtesy of the American Repertory Theater / Photo: Richard Feldman

It was a pleasure to watch Kahn direct and I learned a lot from him. They used buckets of stage blood at each performance. Giovanni comes in at the end, having just killed Annabella (with her heart impaled on his dagger) and wearing her blood-soaked, blood dripping wedding dress. He won’t live to see the curtain come down.

*Derek Smith (Giovanni) and Daniel Von Bargen (Vasquez), foreground*
Courtesy of the American Repertory Theater / photo: Richard Feldman

It was a rare production of a rare play and I loved watching it every night.

End of story.

*

Or was it?

A year and a half later, I was stunned to learn that Joanne Akalaitis was going to be directing Tis Pity She’s a Whore at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago.

Set in Fascist Italy in the 1930s.

Wait, what?

There it was on their brochure. (There was no internet at the time. How did we ever learn about anything?)

Although I lived in Boston, Akalaitis’s production was worth driving to Chicago for. And if memory serves, the drive to Chicago was for that reason only.

I lived in Chicago for two years in the mid 80s. so I knew the Goodman. I had seen Aiden Quinn as Hamlet, directed by Robert Falls. That production was famous for Hamlet tagging a brick wall in Elsinore in spray paint with the words “To be or not to be.”

There was a lot of anticipation as I sat in the cushy seat in the Goodman Theatre waiting for the curtain to rise. I now knew the play inside and out and was eager to see this version. And the curtain went up.

Lauren Tom as Annabella and Jesse Borrego as Giovanni in Akalaitis’s production.
The Goodman Theatre was very gracious in trying to find photographs for me, but they had none, as this show was before they started their digital archive. These two very low-rez photos are pulled from another source.
And the production was in color, by the way…

I was struck by how unalike the shows were. Of course, they were different productions, but both plays were set in 1930s Fascist Italy, weren’t they? I didn’t, of course, expect them to be similar, but I was unprepared for how astoundingly distant they were.

Where Kahn’s production featured this imposing black marble set, Akalaitis’s set, (designed by John Conklin) was like stepping into a surrealist painting. The 1930s is considered the Golden Age of Surrealism. In the Goodman scenic design, perspective was constantly being subverted and the set had non-realistic touches and surreal art.

Lauren Tom as Annabella I(left) in the Goodman production

In Kahn’s production there was an oppression, stemming from the impending Fascist regime, which prevented the forbidden love from flourishing. Akailitis’s production was a world off its axis, of dis-reality and weirdness. The scenic design made it uncomfortable to watch, as if we were in a place which we did not recognize.

Central to the idea of Kahn’s production is the idea that Giovanni and Annabella loved each other. And so her killing her at the end gave the play its ironic tragic dimension.

In Akalaitis’s production, no one loved Annabella, not even Giovanni, who was using her just like all her other suitors. The world Akalaitis created was supremely misogynistic and bleak, with no love to balance the nihilism.

I am guessing that this is the production that would have been done at the A.R.T., had Akalaitis stayed to direct there.

(Lauren Tom and Jesse Borrego played Annabella and Giovanni in Chicago. A year later, Akalaitis’s production moved to New York with Jeanne Tripplehorn and Val Kilmer in the roles.)

The title of this article is “One Concept, Two Directors,” but that’s actually not true. It’s not one concept at all. Yes, they were both set in 1930s Fascist Italy, but that doesn’t explain anything about either production.

Just like when I hear that someone is going to be doing Taming of the Shew in 1910 Mexico, it doesn’t explain anything either.

Setting is not concept. (Although in weak productions, setting will frequently masquerade as a concept.)

Regardless of the productions being in the “same” time and place, these were two completely different ways of seeing the play.

And that’s what makes theatre not a statement, but a conversation.