Casting Announced for A.C.T.'s 'Tis A Pity She's a Whore'

American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) artistic director Carey Perloff announced casting today for A.C.T.'s season finale, Perloff's explosive new production of John Ford's 'TIS A PITY SHE'S A WHORE. This production will include live music composed and performed by San Francisco "avant-baroque" underground cellist Bonfire Madigan Shive, and features A.C.T. core Acting Company member René Augesen and Broadway star Michael Hayden. 'TIS A PITY SHE'S A WHORE. plays A.C.T. June 5 through July 6. Press night is June 11. Tickets—starting at $14—are available by calling A.C.T. Ticket Services at 415.749.2228, or by logging on to www.act-sf.org.

 
A.C.T. offers audiences a fresh encounter with a startling, rarely performed play written in the 1630s, and continues its tradition—set in groundbreaking hits such as Edward II—of boldly reworking classics from a raw, edgy perspective. Considered one of the most controversial works in the English language, 'TIS A PITY SHE'S A WHORE. depicts a seamy world of violence, sex, and betrayal—yet shockingly subverts the Jacobean revenge form to plumb the depths of universal questions of life and death, morality and faith. "Many consider this play to be like Romeo and Juliet, but with a much darker hue," says Perloff. "The play has tremendous power in its message, and feels strikingly modern despite being written almost four centuries ago."

 
Inventively staged in a deconstructed baroque cathedral, the play is set in Parma, Italy, and explores a deadly erotic obsession between siblings Giovanni and Annabella. With clear and gripping poetry, Ford paints a decadent landscape of greed and corruption, helmed by a vicious, amoral clergy. Living with no moral guidance or spiritual grounding, and in a society where women are possessions hawked to the highest bidder, the pair is left to their own dangerous devices—with brutal consequences. "There is a lot of ambivalence in the play about what is 'normal' in a toxic society," says Perloff, "and it's paradoxical because while we know they are siblings, their love seems almost pure next to the corruption around them."

 
Adding an edgy, rapturous element to the play's murky world is visionary cellist, vocalist, and community activist Bonfire Madigan Shive, who will perform live at every performance. A virtuosic blend of avant-garde and baroque sensibility, Shive's cello music provides a key aspect to the kind of fusion theater that this play and A.C.T. strive to create. "I consider my work in this production to be a 'living score,'" says Shive. "I'm shaping the sounds based on each character's emotional interior, so in a sense the music will serve as the heartbeat of the play."

 
Shive has collaborated with such artists as iconoclastic music producer Hal Willner (Lou Reed, Marianne Faithfull, Allen Ginsberg), Joan Jeanrenaud (Kronos Quartet), David Coulter (The Black Rider, The Pogues), Kimya Dawson (Juno soundtrack), Cat Power, Gossip, Fugazi, and Elliott Smith. She is a contributing author to the recently released anthology Live through This: On Creativity and Self-Destruction, sharing company with Nan Goldin, bell hooks, Kate Bornstein, and other creative pioneers. She is a founding member of The Icarus Project, a support network led by people living with experiences commonly labeled "mental illness."

 
In his A.C.T. debut, renowned actor Michael Hayden stars in the lead role of Giovanni. A Juilliard-trained actor, Hayden earned a 2001 Tony Award nomination for his role in Broadway's Judgment at Nuremberg. He also played Billy Bigelow in Nicholas Hytner's 1992 National Theatre production of Carousel, where he received a Theatre World Award as well as Laurence Olivier and Drama Desk Award nominations, and he later went on to reprise that performance on Broadway in 1994. Other credits include Henry IV (Lincoln Center Theater), Merrily We Roll Along (The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts), All My Sons (Roundabout Theatre), Sweet Bird of Youth (Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C.), and Playboy of the Western World (Guthrie Theatre).

 
A.C.T. associate artist and core Acting Company member René Augesen, winner of a 2007 Bay Area Theatre Critics' Circle Award, plays the lead role of Annabella. She recently appeared in A.C.T.'s The Rainmaker and Brainpeople, and her credits include Celebration, The Room, The Beard of Avon, Buried Child, Night and Day, A Doll's House, The Voysey Inheritance (also at Kansas City Repertory Theatre), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,  Luminescence Dating (at Magic Theatre),  and Hedda Gabler. New York credits include Spinning into Butter (Lincoln Center Theater), Macbeth (with Alec Baldwin and Angela Bassett, Public Theater), It's My Party . . . (with F. Murray Abraham and Joyce Van Patten, Arc Light Theater). Augesen is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama.

 
Creating the production's imaginative depth of staging is scenic designer Walt Spangler. He designed Happy End for A.C.T., as well as Mame at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, King Lear at the Goodman Theatre, Carmen for Boston Ballet, Much Ado about Nothing at the Alley Theatre, and the English national tour of Me and My Girl. In New York, he designed Hollywood Arms on Broadway and The Public Theater's acclaimed Twelfth Night in Central Park, among many others. Spangler is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama.
    

Tickets for 'TIS A PITY SHE'S A WHORE. can be purchased at A.C.T. Ticket Services, located at 405 Geary Street, 415.749.2228; or via the A.C.T. website, www.act-sf.org. Groups of 15 or more people are eligible for discounts; please call 415.439.2473.

Sponsored by Bank of the West, a Bring What You Can/Pay What You Wish performance will be held on Thursday, June 12, at 8 p.m. Patrons will be allowed to pay any amount for tickets when they bring a donation of children's books, diapers, or coffee beans to benefit Raphael House, a shelter and support program for homeless families in San Francisco's Tenderloin District. Patrons are limited to one ticket per donated item, one ticket per person. Tickets go on sale at 6 p.m. the day of the performance.

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