Charles
Isherwood

April 28, 2015

As lovers go, this pair would seem to be perfectly matched. They share a fair, pallid beauty, the bloom of youth just discovering the wonder of romance, the intimate knowledge of one another’s charms born of a longstanding relationship. ’Tis pity, however, that they happen to be brother and sister. You might say that Giovanni (Matthew Amendt) and Annabella (Amelia Pedlow), the blood-tied central characters in John Ford’s “ ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore,” are about as star-crossed from the get-go as you could get. Despite all Giovanni’s tortured rationales justifying their incestuous love, we somehow know, from the moment we witness their first sexual embrace, that things will not turn out swimmingly for this pair — unless you mean swimmingly in blood. In any case, let’s give a lusty cheer to the red-blooded Red Bull Theater Company for staging this rarely seen play from the English Renaissance, generally dated from the first years of the 1630s. Although this enterprising troupe has fairly minimal resources compared with the city’s major nonprofit theaters, its members have far more adventurous, indeed admirable, tastes when it comes to choosing repertory. (To my knowledge, the only major American troupe to stage the play recently is the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, in 2008.)