PRODUCTION NOTES

The Revenger's Tragedy is a uniquely cynical, deliciously macabre Jacobean tragedy.  The New York production was set in a tilted, out of kilter world where each character was from a different time period ranging from the 17th to 20th century giving the progession of debauchery and greed from then to now an immediate accessibility and context.  

The play was attributed initially to Cyril Tourneur but modern editors have since decided that Thomas Middleton to be the author. We may never know who wrote it but whoever did they created a whopper.

Revenge is the order of the day and nearly everyone in the play is plotting to undermine each other to gain power. Certainly everyone would like to see the old, debauched Duke in his grave. It is Vindici though who has nursed the longest grievance and through the efforts of his equally treacherous brother at court, Hippolito, he finds a way to trick the old Duke by luring him to an assignation with a young virgin...really the dressed up, poisoned skull of his dead fiance that the Duke raped and murdered years ago.

Knives, plots, sexual assignations, and old hatreds are so common that things are bound to end up badly. And they do. The New York Times stated about the play: "To be honest in this company is to invite disaster" A Jacobean Burlesque of darkly funny misadventures.