John Ford's "Broken Heart" and " "Tis Pity She's a Whore" Chang W. Lee/The New York Times Annika Boras in John Ford's "Broken Heart." THE 17th-century playwright John Ford never met a character he didn't want to kill: gruesomely, ingeniously, poignantly. He liked them stabbed, starved, poisoned, burnt, bled and assaulted by roving packs of bandits. His two best plays - both having forthcoming New York revivals - boast body counts nearly as long as the cast lists. "The Broken Heart," which begins performances next Saturday in a Theater for a New Audience production at the Duke on 42nd Street, leaves seven characters dead. " "Tis Pity She's a Whore" typically offs eight, though fewer perish in the streamlined production from the British troupe Cheek by Jowl that arrives at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on March 20. Owing perhaps to the violence of his plots, the density of his poetry and the intensity of the emotions he describes, Ford isn't often staged in New York. For several centuries he wasn't staged anywhere. Ford began his career as a poet in the early 1600s, then moved to playmaking, working collaboratively with other writers, like Thomas Dekker and John Webster. In the late 1620s Ford struck out on his own, writing eight plays over a decade and then promptly disappearing from the historical record, just as his plays soon disappeared from theaters. Yet Ford has become popular in the last 20 years, and feels wholly contemporary. Mark Houlahan, a senior lecturer at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, said he thought today's audiences responded to Ford's "extremes of violence and passion," while Lisa Hopkins, a Ford authority who teaches at Sheffield Hallam University in England, praised his "aesthetic of silence and nuance." Ford is a playwright of dichotomies, somehow both restrained and outrageous, shrewd and shocking. He didn't shock Selina Cartmell, a young British director making her American debut with "The Broken Heart." This play, probably written in the late 1620s, just before " "Tis Pity," and set in ancient Sparta, features a complex plot concerning three intertwined couples. A posthumous marriage and one of the most macabre dances ever to grace the stage are particular highlights. This failed to intimidate Ms. Cartmell, whose bloody résumé includes stints directing "Sweeney Todd," "Macbeth," "Medea," "Titus Andronicus" and " "Tis Pity She's a Whore." She said she was immediately excited when Jeffrey Horowitz, artistic director of Theater for a New Audience, suggested she direct "The Broken Heart." "I love its challenges," Ms. Cartmell said recently over lunch near the rehearsal space. Ford asks you to create a new vocabulary, to go beyond naturalism. Ford has also asked Ms. Cartmell and her designers to create new varieties of stage blood. The set designer Antje Ellermann said they had constructed "a blood delivery system built into the framing of the set." But for Ms. Cartmell the play's greatest challenges are emotional rather than sanguinary or scenic. "He wants to wake us up," she said, to "push us just as the characters are pushed." Declan Donnellan, the acclaimed director who will present " "Tis Pity" at the Brooklyn Academy, has been awake to the pleasures of Ford for decades. He first staged " "Tis Pity" 30 years ago and studied it in school years before that. This "thrilling play," he wrote in an e-mail from the tour's stop in Australia, is "a human study about an illicit passion, and a compelling insight into our capacity to break rules - indeed the need to break rules." " "Tis Pity" breaks many rules. Set in Renaissance Parma and inhabiting some very tricky moral territory, it concerns the incestuous love between Annabella, to whom the title refers, and her brother Giovanni. Jeanne Tripplehorn and Val Kilmer played the parts in a contentious 1992 Public Theater production, the last major outing of " "Tis Pity" in New York. As scandalous as this affair seems, it's also presented as the play's purest bond, a taboo riff on Romeo and Juliet. Yet Ms. Hopkins, the Sheffield professor, advises that we shouldn't take Ford's moral relativism too far. "I doubt anyone ever came away thinking, "What a marvelous idea, I must go and sleep with my brother," " she said. What New York audiences will think remains to be seen, but for now both plays are testing their directors, designers and particularly their casts. Lydia Wilson, who plays Annabella in " "Tis Pity," described its "brutal velocity." "It feels more like being in a Tarantino film than a Shakespearean tragedy," she wrote in an e-mail between performances. Yet she also discussed the pleasures of taking on such a complicated character. "It's fun to play a girl with intrusive fantasies," she wrote. Extreme behavior is enabling. Annika Boras, who plays Penthea, a heroine of "The Broken Heart," expressed similar sentiments. Her character, disappointed in love and maltreated by a jealous husband, determines to starve herself to death. "There's something liberating about having these extremes to play," she said, exhausted enough from rehearsal that she had to be roused from a chaise longue to talk. In my life I've only had fleeting moments of extremes. Extremes were very much on display just a few hours earlier, when Ms. Cartmell - her hair a blond cloud, her body swathed in layers of gray and black - worked through Penthea's mad scene, using lines of tape to suggest the limits of the stage, a folding table and some empty tin plates to evoke a decayed banquet. For nearly an hour the actors practiced a 10-minute excerpt in which Ms. Boras knocks dishes to the floor, hides beneath the tablecloth and gabbles nonsense. Pausing for a moment Saxon Palmer, who plays Penthea's brother Ithocles, surveyed the stage action. Then he turned to Ms. Cartmell. "It's scary," he said. It's disturbing. "Yes," she said cheerfully. It is scary. It is disturbing. Then she had him run the scene again.