Collective's "The Duchess of Malfi'

John Webster wrote The Duchess of Malfi in 1612, a few decades before an English revolution that replaced a barbarous king with a parliamentary democracy. So it might seem odd for the Philadelphia Artists Collective, a new 21st-Century company, to debut with this play about courtly intrigue and revenge written almost 400 years ago.

But the Collective's taut, gripping production doesn't so much show us the atrocities of an absolute monarchy as it begs the question of what we've gained by waiting our turn at the ballot box.

The nobles in Duchess surely behave odiously, carrying out their betrayals and murders through stolen letters, gifted rings and—on one occasion—a poisoned Bible. Their titles, such as "Provisor of the Horse," create distance between Webster's time and ours. But the Collective's enthralling portrayal of the ambition, deceit and amorality that makes "politicians the devil's quilted anvils" generates all the timeliness this play requires.

Total darkness

Director Dan Hodge eschews the theatrical gimmicks applied too often to productions by Webster's contemporary Shakespeare. Instead, Hodge's straightforward approach employs minimal though exacting lighting by Matt Sharp (including a scene set in total darkness) as well as a pair of musicians to engross us psychologically and then shock us with the script's more macabre elements.

Hodge does trim Duchess from five acts to two halves, but his direction lingers over psychologically revealing passages that another director might cut or sensationalize. Hodge also demands that his cast members realize the collective potential of their classical training. These two choices result in a powerful and compelling emotional landscape.

This production finds no cardboard villains or exalted heroes. Instead, Jared Michael Delaney's mercenary teeters brilliantly between cynicism and righteous condemnation. Charlotte Northeast tempers her Duchess's virtue with caprice, and Brian McCann's Cardinal veers wildly from his prudent advice at court to his bloodthirsty lust in the bedroom. Even in the sparsely written waiting woman Cariola, Megan Slater achieves a magnificent fullness of her character. Only Adam Altman's rich and sympathetic portrayal as the Duchess's lover shows unequivocally what happens to sincerity amongst such dishonorable men.

Election analogies

Duchess vividly details the revolting but nonetheless engrossing invidiousness that occurs when two positions of moral ambiguity battle one another. As in politics, the conclusion leaves us wondering if any such characters are capable of traversing a journey that redeems them.

In Webster's age, as in his plays, commoners could at least count on tyrants to unseat one another through murder and betrayal. Fittingly for an election season, The Duchess of Malfi ends not with a call for the bloody revolution that followed Webster's age, but with a final appeal that we live our lives justly.