Word: whore
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STUART VAUGHAN'S production of John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore is intelligent in conception, a bit deficient in acting, and incredibly rich in details of staging. This Caroline tragedy, first performed at the Phoenix in 1633 by the Queen's Players, receives here an opulent mounting worthy of its subject matter an equal in quality to the Loeb presentation several years ago of Middleton's Women, Beware Women. It seemed easier then than it does now to cast a jaundiced eye on the obvious decadence of subject matter in the plays of Shakespeare's successors...
...Pity She's a Whore in this presentation is the work of the Loeb's "first visiting director." Vaughan's excellent directorial effort, hopefully, will encourage the Harvard Dramatic Club to extend similar invitations in the future. Shedding some of their provinciality in the process, the usual retinue of Harvard dramatic talents have come up here with an entertaining, visually delectable staging of a difficult play. If you're ever going to see a Loeb play, see this one. The costumes, the set and an unearthly masque in the second act are splendid surface externals in a play which shows...
Christine's charming father of the earlier film reappears this time as the gloomy patron of a whore house ("It takes a good house to make a happy home," he explains lamely to Antoine). Most pathetic of all, though, is Antoine's extracurricular lover, a speechless Japanese girl whose expression of devotion is the almost casual remark. "If I commit suicide with anyone, I'd like it to be with...
...there a woman who can?" Now mind you, Norman Mailer once admitted quite frankly that he had never read Virginia Woolf. Not only that, he would presumably prefer Jayne to Katherine Mansfield ("I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman writer," he once said, "until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale"), and he has probably never even heard of Kate Chopin. Considering his utter lack of knowledge about women writers, his declaration about Lawrence is more than arrogant; it is nonsense...
...that chance. Whatever influences ran through Jones' mind, the hard-driving male delighting in war and sport became more obviously and simplistically the author's romantic hero. Compassion gave way to cynicism; where it survived it was mawkish and self-conscious. (Minelli was kinder to the small-town whore and gambler in Some Came Running than Jones was in his book, though both were negligible works...