Akalaitis' 'Tis Pity She's a Whore

In an interview JoAnne Akalaitis says she usually doesn't direct plays she already knows. Likewise, I, during my career from assistant lecturer in 1974 to assistant professor in 2000, teaching drama to students majoring in English, never taught a play I had read before, never repeated teaching it afterwards. During this over a quarter century, I taught plays from Aeschylus' Oresteia to Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead . Sometimes, however, in the course of preparing or delivering my lectures, I discovered new things, some of which I would tell to students and some, being sexual, political, religious or social taboos, I kept to myself. Now, in January 2000, while teaching Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, I began to discover a major sexual taboo. In fact, Shakespeare wrote the play on the wake of his emotional crisis with his mistress who was one of Queen Elizabeth's maids, and thus Shakespeare was so bitter about womankind, and he looked at women not as the fairest creatures but as female animals, and he considered love not as a noble emotion which elevated man above the beast, but as a beastly practice. Thus, thoughout the play, there are references and allusions to and imagery of animal functions and organs of the human body. Shakespeare uses in the play for his mouthpiece to air his attitdues, the foul-mouthed Fool Thersites who swears, curses, plasphemes with an ugly rhetoric and a dismaying eloquence. In this play, Shakespeare tries to deliver the message that the Trojan war was not because of honor, dignity, love and beauty, but because, and here Shakespeare couldn't and therefore didn't use the word, but Akalaitis could and did at the final curtain of her production of John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, when a banner appears on the stage written on it the word Shakespeare wanted to use but couldn't, but Akalaitis used: C.U.N.T.