Superb film-noir 'White Devil' at Broad Street Ministry

You have to let Webster be Webster. And that's what the Philadelphia Artists' Collective does in a superb version of John Webster's tragedy of chaos and perversity, The White Devil, running through May 20 at the Broad Street Ministry.

This wild Shakespearean-era gem could run away with a less talented troupe. But PAC turns this White Devil into a lean, muscular banquet of evil. With aggressive yet sensitive trimming, director and PAC cofounder Damon Bonetti tames this mad beast, and, in a master-stroke, he sets the play in the world of 1940s-'50s film noir. The cast trusts Webster's poetry to reveal character and create momentum. And the banquet table rests on four sturdy performances.

What ignites all the revenge and betrayal is the Duke of Brachiano's affair with Vittoria, a married woman of Venice. She, nicknamed the White Devil, is beneath him socially, which enrages the Duke's brother Francisco. Neither the Devil nor the Duke cares: Each has a clueless belief that they're inviolate.

The fabulous Charlotte Northeast plays Vittoria as a real honey badger: She doesn't give a squat, and down to almost the end, her bearing is assured, wry, and elite. Her crowning moment is her mid-play trial for whoredom. Rocking a two-bit-classy fur stole, the film noir garb of the gold-digger, she defeats lawyers and clergy and Francisco. Jared Reed is a magnetic Brachiano, resolute in love, contemptuous of all, murderous. You like these two; you shouldn't, but you do. There's an irresistible blind confidence in the way Brachiano, planning to murder his wife and Vittoria's husband, says, "Small mischiefs are by greater made secure."

On stage the most is our chorus and emcee Flamineo, played with kinetic flare by Dan Hodge, PAC cofounder. He is the White Devil's brother and the Duke's ambitious secretary. He pimps them at the onset, and re-pimps them when they fall out (mostly because he's afraid of getting fired). Hodge, such a great Bottom in Midsummer Night's Dream at the Arden, lets loose, amid the blood and obsession, a comic eruption of one-liners that prompt guilty laughter.

And John Lopes is excellent as Francisco, square-jawed, bug-eyed with astonishment, natty in the three-piece pinstripe suit of bloody intent. The second half of the play is really the History of Francisco. "Far be it from my thoughts to seek revenge," he says, in the least sincere line ever. And he does a pretty good Pat O'Brien impression as an Irish general.

Despite its title, this play centers less on Vittoria than on the boiling machinations of those around her. There's even a feminist subtext: All this depravity is driven by fear of feminine desire, misogyny so deep it destroys. That thread, of sick desire obsessed with desire, sings beautifully in Stefán Örn Jensen's single-cello music throughout. As Flamineo tells us, The White Devil is "beyond melancholy," showing us the human soul, like "a dead man's skull beneath the roots of flowers."