‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore

The Warehouse, 1019 7th Street NW

Remaining Performances:

Friday, July 16 at 8:00 p.m.
Saturday, July 17 at 10:00 p.m.
Sunday, July 25 at 6:30 p.m.

They Say: “A juicy story of secret lovers, betrayal, incest and revenge, among the most controversial plays in English literature — See it onstage: all the romance, all the lust, all the blood! From the theatre that brought you “Jack the Ticket Ripper.”"

Glen’s Take: The historical rap on ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore — the thing to which the Georgetown Theatre Company folks are referring, with that “most contrversial” jazz —  is that the play, written in 1629 or so, revels in debauchery (incest, bloody vengeance, post-mortem dismemberment, etc.) without ever carving out a moral center.

I know, right?  In a post-Tarantino America, the complaint seems kind of … adorable.

Props to director Alia Faith Williams and company for having done the hard, good work of paring a play that usually runs over three hours down to a spry-ish 90 minutes by neatly excising huge chunks of text. The result isn’t as clean as it could be — denied their respective subplots, Frank O’Donnell‘s Richardetto and Nathan Cederoth‘s Grimaldi just sort of hang around as if they’re waiting for the next bus out of town. But as a canny, quick-on-his-feet servant, Terence Aselford gets some nice, oily bits of business in, and Lindsay Duso sinks her teeth into her woman scorned with an unapologetic and at times downright operatic brashness that’s big, yes, but you can’t say it doesn’t fill the stage and goose the energy.

The two leads, Evan Crump and Jessica Shearer Wilson are only given one note to play, though you may wish for a bit more variation in tone from Crump’s Giovanni. Scene to scene, his delivery vacillates between insistent and shrill — and even if you’re prepared to cut him some slack on the forcefulness front, given that his character is both 1. a pompous academic and 2. consumed with boning his sister, it’d be nice to see more of an arc.

Playwright John Ford (no, not that one – but how awesome would THAT be?) wrote dialogue that’s clean, vigorous and often funny, and it’s done good service here.  The fight choreography’s tight, and features characters shouting things like “Have at you!” and “Vengeance!”,  which: Yes, please.

The much-discussed blood doesn’t really show up till the closing minutes, but when it does there’s gouts of it; and the play’s most famous image –a grisly cardio-kebab — will put you off Fort Fringe burgers for a day or so.

See it if: VC Andrews-brand siblings + “Have at you!” + Post-mortem dismemberment = Your winning formula.

Skip it if: You’re unwilling to wait a bit to get your visceral ya-yas out, and routinely eat dessert first.

Trouble viewing? Try the YouTube version.

Ok, so you’ve seen what my arm looked like. Well, I walked about 20 blocks or so with my sleeve rolled up and that gash in plain view, and needless to say I got some very interesting reactions. One teenage boy was stupefied by it, and begged me to cover it up. When he found out it was fake he said, “Oh man, that’s tight! You’re gonna scare the shit outta people with that!”

At another point, a man walked out of a storefront just as I was passing him, my arm in his face. “HOLY FUCK!” he screamed (even the capital letters don’t do his expression justice). “Is that a tattoo gone wrong, man? SHIT!”

And then there was the very nice bus boy who was sent by the patrons of his restaurant to make sure I was all right (at this point I was sitting on the sidewalk). I told him I was waiting for a very slow ambulance, but my smirk betrayed me and he knew what was up. Still, he couldn’t take his eyes off my arm.

Probably my favorite reaction of the evening came from a homeless man who was sitting against a building. He saw me and started cracking up. I looked at my arm and then back at him. “Yeah, it’s been a rough day man,” I told him.

“Man, I know how that is,” he said, and I left him there in hysterics.

What was really remarkable, however, was the number of non-reactions, or silent reactions, from people whose eyeballs doubled in size but didn’t say anything, or those who stifled their gasps of horror and moved on down the street. One man averted his young son’s eyes. A girl steered her boyfriend in the opposite direction from me. People at street corners just tended to whisper. I wonder how these bad Samaritans would’ve reacted in the days of the Grand Guignol if they had been fortunate to see a performance by Paula Maxa, the blood theater’s star actress. I leave you with the Molotov Theater’s shocking description of Maxa, and a plug for their Fringe production, The Sticking Place:

In 1917 Camille Choisy hired the actress Paula Maxa, who soon became known as “the Sarah Bernnhardt of the impasse Chaptal.” During her career at the Grand-Guignol, Maxa, “the most assassinated woman in the world,” was subjected to a range of tortures unique in theatrical history, including the following: she was shot with a rifle and with a revolver, scalped, strangled, disemboweled, raped, guillotined, hanged, quarted, burned, cut apart with surgical tools and lancets, cut into eighty-three pieces by an invisible Spanish dagger, stung by a scorpion, poisoned with arsenic, devoured by a puma, strangled by a pearl necklace, and whipped; she was also put to sleep by a bouquet of roses, kissed by a leper, and subjected to a very unusual metamorphosis, which was described by one theatre critic: “Two hundred nights in a row, she simply decomposed on stage in front of an audience which wouldn’t have exchanged its seats for all the gold in the Americas. The operation lasted a good two minutes during which the young woman transformed little by little into an abominable corpse.”

The Sticking Place
The Shop at Fort Fringe

Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 19 @ 9:00 PM
Thursday, July 24 @ 8:00 PM
Saturday, July 26 @ 3:00 PM

They say: “The DC News career ladder has quite a few rotten rungs! The Sticking Place tells the story of young professionals sucked into this seedy underbelly of the Capital City. Bloodplay, thrill killing, twisted sexual politics, misfits and jerks. If we don’t disgust you, it’s not for lack of trying!”

Trey’s take: Try harder. With the exception of a few glimmers of wit — and what’s probably the best use of chitlins I’ve seen on a DC stage — this Grand Guignol-inspired black comedy feels like the sort of thing a bunch of Saturday Night Live B-listers might whip up for the company holiday party: a decent germ of an idea, underdeveloped and overplayed.

A curtain-raising video montage (quick-cut images of everything from surgery to S&M to humping monkeys) promises an adventurous evening, and as things progress a few tartly phrased silent-movie scene titles serve up a laugh or two.

But mostly, from its context-setting opening monologue (involving the longest TV-news stand-up in recorded history) to its unsurprising final twist (suggested subtitle: “The Revenge of Catherine Tramell”), Molotov Theatre’s tatty little would-be shocker strikes false note after false note. (D.C. bars close at 2 a.m. on weekends? A sex-and-cutting fad among area hipsters is a story an ambitious TV hairdo complains about having to cover?) In a genre whose shocking, titillating pleasures are supposedly rooted in a commitment to realism, that’s kind of a problem.

More disappointing: That a nominally ballsy young cast and creative team thinks it’ll earn a laugh with a bit of accent-mocking in an Asian-takeout scene. And that a Fringe audience doesn’t get the reference when a solo-on-Friday twentysomething, having just been hung up on by said accent, notes this truism: “I’ve officially hit bottom. I’ve been rejected by Yum’s.”

See it if: Your torn-from-the-sensationalized-headlines needs are too urgent for Law & Order: SVU to satisfy.

Skip it if: You’d hate to defile your fond memories of Cherry Red.