”Tis Pity She’s a Whore’ At Yale; ‘Jimmy And Lorraine’ Revisit Hartbeat

The graduate thesis projects for the students in the directing program at the Yale School of Drama are large-scale productions. The acting students at the school spend a year on mastering Elizabethan verse dramas. So a staging of the slightly post-Elizabethan tragedy “‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore” is an exciting proposition.

Jesse Rasmussen, who did a raw underground rendition of “Alice in Wonderland” at the Yale Summer Cabaret in June, says she was drawn to this provocative drama from the 1630s —which involves incest, multiple murders and outright misogyny — because of “the brutal extremity of it. I call it the dirty little sister to ‘Romeo and Juliet.'”

She says she’s cut a lot of the text “to make this the action movie it wants to be.” “‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore” will be staged with shocking intimacy, “like an underground boxing ring,” at the Yale University Theater, with the audience seated on the stage area surrounding the actors. “It’s important to engage with the architecture of the University Theater’s bowels — see the electrical system, the plumbing.”

Rasmussen, who came to Yale having already started the successful theater company Four Larks in her native Australia, says that “when doing such dark material, it’s one of my rules to make sure the actors have a lot of fun in the [rehearsal] room. They’ve been so brave, so generous.”

“‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore” is at the Yale School of Drama Jan. 31 to Feb. 4. Performances are Tuesday through Friday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m. Tickets are $25, $15 for students. 203-432-1234, drama.yale.edu

Jimmy And Lorraine, Together Again

HartBeat Ensemble’s biographical drama “Jimmy and Lorraine” is about two influential and incendiary writers and activists of the 1950s and ’60s, James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry.

The play, written by Talvin Wilks and directed by Brian Jennings, was a hit at Hartbeat’s Carriage House space in 2015. It returns for three performances — Jan. 27 and 28 at 7:30 p.m., and Jan. 29 at 2 p.m. — at the University of St. Joseph’s Autorino Center for the Arts, 1678 Asylum Ave., West Hartford, with its original cast: Aaron Pitre as Baldwin and Vanessa Butler (who appeared in two shows at Hartford Stage this season) as Hansberry. Tickets are $25, $20 for seniors and Let’s Go! Arts members, $15 for students. 860-548-9144, hartbeatensemble.org.