Rockin’ Realism : Cousins team up for an updated version of John Ford’s ‘ ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore’

Annabella and Giovanni are in love. They’re going to have a baby. They’re brother and sister.

That’s the bare-bones premise of John Ford’s 17th-Century tragedy “ ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore,” which opened last week in a brand-new, updated, rock-music version at the Cast Theatre in Hollywood. Retooled and expanded since its February premiere at the Olio, the show is adapted and directed by Robert A. Prior, with an original score by Andrew Yeater. (He and Prior are first cousins.)

“The performance style of Ford’s time is basically gone,” Prior, 26, explained of his and Yeater’s high-voltage interpretation. “We don’t have that heroic, over-the-top performance tradition anymore. In fact, the American tradition is just the opposite: incredible moment-to-moment realism. But rock ‘n’ roll still has that heroic scale, that urgency. And that’s what we’re going for.”

“When you add the right music to a scene, whatever drama there was can be heightened, expanded, underlined,” added Yeater, 27. “I don’t think people could play the scenes the way we’re doing them without music. The action is so dynamic; the emotions are tearing these people apart. So sometimes instead of subtly trying to convey something, you just hit the power chord and tell the audience what you’re feeling. People don’t say, ‘I’m sad.’ They say, ‘I’m SAD!!! ‘ “

His electronic score is an almost operatic assemblage that moves frequently from speech to song--often in mid-sentence.

“Everything is punctuated musically,” Yeater said. “The dialogue, the sound effects. The music controls the pace of the show--and the actors must match up with it. What that does is force them to really be there. They can never not know what’s coming next. They have to know where this arm goes and what foot to start on, what the word is, where the beat is coming, when they have to catch the person flying through the air. They cannot be neutral out there. If they’re not involved, it’ll run them over.”

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Much of the cousins’ focus has been on creating a new performance style, something to shake up what they see as often placid theater. “It’s not just in terms of volume,” Yeater said. “I see some shows where the people put a chair and table on stage, and read the lines. They never break down--or break the chair. Well, we try to break a chair in every show. And if there’s a table on stage, you can be sure people are going to jump on it, make love on it, die on it. . . .”

Such 1980s theatrics, Prior believes, dovetail nicely with the 1620s Parma setting. “We live in a decadent period,” he said. “This was a decadent period too. There was a huge right-wing movement going on; Cromwell was eight years away; the theater was about to be closed; the aristocracy was going to the dogs--holding onto its privileges. This play deals with taboos: In the midst of the society breaking down, a family is breaking down. These children don’t have guidance; no one is helping them out.”

Yeater, too, feels the relevance.

“A lot of people today are living through those things,” he said. “Big confusion, big alienation. Big pain. When there are homeless people on the street, thousands of young people turning tricks in Hollywood with no place to live, people shooting each other, selling crack. . . . The kids in this play are out of touch with each other, with their society. And there’s this incredible violence, greed, avarice overlaying everything. The people are beautifully attired but spiritually void.”

The staging will duplicate that surface splendor: faux marble tables and chairs, faux leather walls, red velvet drapes. Thirteen actors will wear 40 costumes (mixing Elizabethan and ‘80s styles), 127 pieces of jewelry. Rock-show-type lighting replaces the Olio’s limited visual system. In that earlier staging, “dark and darkest were our colors,” Prior quipped. A big boost came in a $5,000 grant from the Barbara H. Culver Foundation.

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Yeater emphasized that although 90% of Ford’s original text has been retained, he has no qualms about making adjustments: “We love classical theater. But there’s a language and cultural problem that makes it inaccessible to anyone under the age of 30 who’s grown up watching American television and movies. If we did this as a museum piece kind of representation, people would be cheated--because it wouldn’t be told in a language that directly affected them.

“So we take the story, strip if down, change a few words. Then we give it concept music, from Top 40 to heavy metal to a filmic kind of approach. Maybe people won’t get all the thee’s and thou’s , but they’ll get the visceral sense of it. They’ll know what’s happening. We want to share this with people who wouldn’t be tempted to see the latest staging of ‘Twelfth Night’ at the Globe. We’re making an effort to talk to the kid who’s going to see the next Metallica concert, or the latest Mel Gibson movie.”

Prior is also unapologetic about the changes to the original text. “I don’t think Ford would mind,” he said. “We really are respectful of the show. I mean, it’s our play--but it’s his play. I don’t think anybody who digs Elizabethan theater and wants to have that kind of an evening will be disappointed. Sure, it’s outrageous and flamboyant. But I also think it has a great deal of integrity.”

And theater, both men said, is perfect for such a vehicle.

“Television and movies do realism so much better,” said Prior, whose past ventures into the classics include a 1985 staging of “Troilus and Cressida”--with Yeater’s score--at the Globe. “They have the realistic tradition down. Theater’s power is to create magic: the ability for someone to walk out and say, ‘I am Lord Soranzo’--and for two hours, you’re going to buy it. That’s what makes theater so powerful. You take people on trips with their imaginations.”