It has also, so far as anyone can remember, never received a professional production in Boston. In this academically and culturally prideful town, that's kind of incredible, and the novelty may be enough to attract a few more ticket buyers.
But the best reason to see this "Duchess of Malfi" is that David R. Gammons is directing it. Both in ASP's "Titus Andronicus" a couple of years ago and in "The Lieutenant of Inishmore" at New Repertory Theatre earlier this season, Gammons has shown that he knows exactly how to stage a gorefest, with or without buckets of blood. So it's not surprising that his "Duchess of Malfi" has plenty of violence, but not a drop more than it needs.
This is a Jacobean revenge tragedy, after all, so it is required by statute to litter the stage with dead bodies, an objective it achieves by increasingly grotesque and unlikely means. If there's another drama that kills off a character by having her kiss a poisoned book, I can't think of it just now.
Yet even that implausible demise makes perfect sense here: Gammons lets us see, without quite noticing at the time, the deliciously evil Cardinal (played, deliciously, by Joel Colodner) slip something out of his pocket and rub his Bible with it just before proffering it to his victim. It's a small touch, but it's typical of the intelligent care this production uses to guide us through the sometimes dense thickets of Webster's plotting, character development, and dark poetry.
For Webster is not, actually, Shakespeare. His plots conceal their creaks less adroitly, his characters contradict themselves less plausibly, and his lines, though full of striking images, rarely achieve the crystalline complexity of Shakespeare's best. (Well, whose does?) But Gammons has slashed the text with abandon, leaving all the juiciest bits and also highlighting the stark central tale: The wealthy, widowed Duchess of Malfi, against the wishes of her brothers (that nasty Cardinal and his equally nasty and much crazier brother, Ferdinand), secretly marries her steward, Antonio, touching off a series of schemes and slayings that will culminate in the aforementioned corpse-strewn stage.
