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In theater,” said that poet and visionary of drama, Antonin Artaud, in The Theater and Its Double, “there is a kind of strange sun, an unusually bright light by which the difficult, even the impossible, suddenly appears to be our natural medium. And [John] Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore is lit by the brilliance of that strange sun.” 

Impact Theater now has onstage, in LaVal’s Subterranean, what’s become the most famous play by Ford, one of the many stars in the British dramatic firmament of the Elizabethan and Stuartian reigns that have been eclipsed by Shakespeare’s solar power, remaining to many readers and playgoers mere names: Middleton, Marston, Webster, Tourneur, Greene and Peele, to mention just a half-dozen of the most obvious. (Indeed, that other towering genius of the time, Ben Jonson, is hardly more than a reference to most).  

“Deep in a dump alone John Ford was gat/With folded arms and melancholy hat.” The old ditty, from “Choice Drollery,” maybe sums up why there was only one revival of Ford’s play for over two centuries, during the Restoration (Pepys saw and disliked it—though he spotted a blonde in the cast he did like). 

Victorian poets, such as Swinburne, and psychologists and men of letters, like Havelock Ellis, rediscovered this kind of ferocious Baroque drama, and an abridged translation by Symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck (an influence on Chekhov, Yeats and Beckett) finally brought it back to the stage in the 1880s. 

There’s plenty of laughter at times, anyway, as the tone of the play shifts wildly from gripping to dire irony, to burlesque, and back to gripping. Impact’s usual fare consists of burlesk, with a “k,” new plays (often by local playwrights) and a Shakespeare or two thrown in. They deserve much credit for getting this “monstre sacree” of Baroque drama back on the boards. 

What’s the sting in this “melancholic” yet energetic play which kept it out of sympathy with producers and critics for so long? Partly its subject matter: Giovanni, the male protagonist opens the play by defending his dream of incestuous love to his confessor—and then discovers his sister, Annabella, shares his feelings.  

“There is no heaven and no earth for him,” Artaud writes, “only the strength of his tumultuous passion, which evokes a correspondingly rebellious passion in Annabella.” They proceed to consummate their maverick bond—and the run of dire consequences begins. 

The Impact production is, by necessity, a chamber play, the chamber—Andrew Susskind’s blue wall with a blue lamp hanging over a blue-dressed bed curtained in gauze—beneath the pizza parlor upstairs. Impact artistic director Melissa Hillman puts a cast of 14 through the hoops of stylized Baroque metaphysical potboiler. “Melissa’s been dying to direct this for years,” said Managing Director Cheshire Isaacs. 

Keeping it clear and close to the text, and moving right along, she gets consistently good performances from John Ferreira as Friar Bonaventura, Mary Ann Mackey as Mme. Florio (transposed genderwise from Annabella and Giovanni’s widower father in the original), Tim Redmond as the father of the buffoonish suitor (and first, mistaken casualty) Bergetto (Jai Sahai), and a sense of grim energy and resolve from Seth Hans Thygesen as Vasques, retainer and a kind of double agent and revenger and Harold Pierce as a scheming physician. 

The women play female roles like a maid and confidante (Miyuki Bierlein), a spurned lover (Mayra Gaeta) or the niece of a doctor and another love interest (Kendra Oberhauser)—or male roles as henchmen and cronies (Sarah Coykendall). 

As siblings turned lovers, Marissa Keltie and John Terrell play unevenly for most of the show—then, in the crucial, harrowing final scenes, they come through where it counts, with a sense of the transcendental drive Artaud talked about, hellbent and implacable. 

Those scenes aren’t for the fainthearted, but are great theater, suspense and cruel action that surpass mere melodrama. There is a lot of salutary gore, served with dispatch; the audience laughs at the curtain call when the smiling actors take their bow in blood-drenched costumes.