Joseph Fisher’s ebulliently sordid (I Am Still) the Duchess of Malfi
is less an updating of John Webster’s original Jacobean revenge drama
than it is a romp in its macabre sandbox. The plot and characters have
been jumbled and streamlined into a violently dissonant two-act that
winkingly borrows tropes from camp and noir. Thus, the title amounts to
an interesting bit of sport on the play’s identity; it, like the titular
duchess, slyly insists on remaining itself.
The
setup remains similar: The widowed duchess of Malfi (Sara Catherine
Wheatley) is forbidden ever to remarry by her two brothers, the insane
Ferdinand (Jake Street) and the sociopathic cardinal (Todd van Voris, in
a beautifully deadpan performance), but nonetheless secretly marries
her poised steward, Antonio (Vin Shambry). Retribution ensues.
In Fisher’s take,
Bosola (Chris Murray), the instrument of that retribution, is reimagined
as a wisecracking, immoral war vet with posturing straight out of The Wild One;
the duchess vamps like a celebutante; and once-stolid confidante Delio
(Nicholas Hongola) is recast as a comic, dandified Perez Hilton figure
in cahoots with the audience. In director Jon Kretzu and set designer
Daniel Meeker’s staging, the duchy of Amalfi is a steampunk assemblage
of Gothic past and present, where a church and a discotheque amount to
essentially the same thing—red, black, white and flickering light.
The play’s second act
tilts more serious—the punch line comes first and the fall second, in
the old Italian style—and here only some of the characters survive,
literally and figuratively. In keeping with a spelled-out moral about
contemporary parasitic celeb worship, the duchess much too suddenly
becomes a noble (and willing) victim of the audience as much as the
cardinal, while the overplayed Bosola’s turn in her favor remains
unfortunately obscure and unlikely, despite quite a bit of primal-scene
hand-wringing. But the play retains its interest throughout, in no small
part because of the actors’ knowing, agile performances and the
director’s similar agility from scene to scene. Kept mostly at distance
from the broadly sketched characters, one finds it quite easy to sit
back and enjoy the dishy spectacle just like we’re (not) supposed to.
SEE IT: Artists Repertory Theatre, 1515 SW Morrison
St., 241-1278, artistsrep.org. 7:30 pm Tuesdays-Saturdays, 2 and 7:30
pm Sundays. Closes Feb. 12. $25-$50.
