'En Avant!': A Companionable Evening With Tennessee Williams

Here’s a question for playwright/performer William Shuman: What’s a genteel little play like yours doing in a place like the New York International Fringe Festival?

The play in question is a one-man show called En Avant!  An Evening With Tennessee Williams. It is a loving tribute to the great playwright, with none of the quirkiness or metaphysical meanderings associated with many of the Fringe offerings.

Fans of Mr. Williams will find much to admire in this 75-minute monolog (directed by Ruis Woertendyke)—in turns informative, insightful, gossipy, and introspective—as Mr. Shuman takes on the persona of Mr. Williams, who, according to the program, is joining us from a world he inhabits somewhere “between here and heaven” three decades after his death.

The set is simple:  A wicker chair, a table with a decanter of liquor that gradually diminishes in volume during the course of the play, and another table holding a typewriter and copies of some of Mr. Williams’s work. 

When first he appears, dressed in a white suit and blue shirt, Mr. Shuman as Mr. Williams is somewhat diffident, seemingly surprised to see us and even more surprised to learn that we still remember him.  “I’m gonna fix myself a little drink, then we can spend some time together,” he says, and then proceeds to pour the first of many such little drinks that will fuel the conversation. 

He starts with the safe stuff: something about his early life, a tidbit about an ancestor named Preserved Fish Dakin, how he underwent the name change from Tom to Tennessee, his early writing efforts and successes.  This all feels like well-honed audience material, something for the talk shows and public speaking engagements. 

But as he warms to the task (and as the alcohol begins to provide that famous “click” he talks about in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof), he opens up about his difficult father (“the man in the overstuff chair”), whom he says treated him contemptibly and referred to him as “Miss Nancy.”   He also speaks of some of the other men in his life—Kip, his first love, and Frank, whom he walked away from. He admits that he was not able to commit himself to any relationship for very long (“We fucked and we fought for a year and a half, and then I couldn’t take it.”)

He talks of the actress Laurette Taylor, struggling to overcome a 15-year drinking binge (“the longest wake in history”) to take on the role of Amanda in the original production of The Glass Menagerie.  She was, he says, “constantly ad-libbing in an accent I’ve yet to identify.”  Yet, in the end, of course, she gave a performance that has become the stuff of legends. 

     

He regrets the lack of public and critical appreciation for his later plays, which were sometimes experimental in nature and served to move him forward as a writer.  Interestingly enough, some of these are receiving a new hearing (e.g. the current revelatory production of The Two Character Play, starring Amanda Plummer and Brad Dourif). 

But, in the end, nothing matters to him so much as the writing.  Through all of the ups and downs of his life, the struggles with failure and with success—and with the booze, the barbiturates, and the boys—it is the writing that kept him going.

“If I could not write, I’d cease to exist,” he says, leaving his posthumous appearance before us as evidence of the truth of this statement. 

En Avant! (the phrase, meaning “onward,” was Mr. Williams’s motto) makes for a most companionable and intimate theatrical evening at its Fringe venue, the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center in the Lower East Side.  I’m guessing that, like his subject, Mr. Shuman will continue to tinker with both the work and his performance of it over time, but hopefully he will keep the tone conversational and relaxed as it is now. 

On a sad note, I would like to express my condolences on the passing of Shirley Herz, the well-known theatrical press agent, whose firm Shirley Herz Associates serves as publicist for En Avant! An Evening With Tennessee Williams. Broadway recognized her many years of contributions earlier this week by dimming its lights.  We join in saluting her.

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‘The Two-Character Play’: Exquisite Production Reveals A Tennessee Williams Masterwork

Brad Dourif and Amanda Plummer:  Brilliant in 'The Two-Character Play'

I owe Tennessee Williams an apology—though, in my defense, it has taken a near miracle to get me to understand this. 

Indeed, something nearly miraculous is occurring at the New World Stages, with the revival of Williams's seldom-seen The Two-Character Play: the opportunity to discover that the old boy still has the power to amaze and thrill audiences.

Prior to last night—having seen the play 40 years ago in its earlier incarnation as Out Cry—I had placed it near the top of a shortlist of Disasters-I-Have-Endured as a lifelong theatergoer.  

Not any more. 

Thanks to brilliant directing by Gene David Kirk and exquisite performances by Brad Dourif and Amanda Plummer, this production is a true revelation. 

Williams, who famously never stopped tinkering with his writing, spent ten years working on The Two-Character Play, which he called his best play since Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and the “most beautiful” since A Streetcar Named Desire.  Based on the current production, I would tend to agree.

The Two-Character Play is nothing like his more famous and far-more-popular earlier works. It takes us deeply into the realm of Pirandello (metatheater), and Beckett (absurdism), and Ionesco (absurdism with an emotional fillip).  The transition is complete and can stand proudly alongside the best of those more famous purveyors of the form.  Williams totally gets it.   

I felt this way last year when I saw the engaging production of In Masks Outrageous and Austere at the Culture Project.  But that play, said to be Williams’s last completed work, does carry with it an asterisk of sorts, as many hands set about shaping it after his death.  I was particularly taken with the sly humor that pervaded that production, a contrast with the popular image of Williams in his later years as a depressed alcoholic has-been.  

However, The Two-Character Play is all Williams, and is subject only to rediscovery.  The heightened language (at times Shakespearean), and the often-quite-funny gallows humor are all his. 

This is a tale of the downward spiral of a brother and sister (Felice and Clare), a pair of middle-aged actors, whose lives were damaged beyond repair when their father shot their mother and then himself, “unkindly forgetting his children,” as Clare puts it in a line ripe with double-edged meaning.  The pair are bound to one another, both understanding they are doomed to the inevitable act of finishing their father’s task, yet wanting to postpone their fate as long as they possibly can.

The title references the play-within-a-play, a version of their lives they perform for themselves and for us, their audience.  It is a theme with many variations and improvisations, and carries with it colorations of agoraphobia, fear, anxiety, escapist fantasy, paranoia, loss, and dementia:  a Pandora’s box with dark humor and imagined hope in place of the real thing. 

Watching Mr. Dourif and Ms. Plummer bring these characters to three-dimensional life is to study theatrical masters at the top of their game. It seems that Ms. Plummer, in particular, has figured out every breath, every gesture, every quality of speech she needs in order to fully occupy the character of Clare—so much so, that by play’s end, I wondered whether Felice was actually still alive or was only being kept alive in Clare’s determined if troubled mind. 

Much speculation has been offered up regarding the extent to which Williams was representing aspects of his life and that of his mentally ill sister, Rose.  But I prefer to credit him as an artist who wrote with great intentionality and with an eye to having his work produced for a paying audience.  This above all kept him going despite his battles with personal demons. 

In the play, Clare mentions a doctor who  “once told me that you and I were the bravest people he know.   

“I said, ‘Why, that’s absurd.  My brother and I are terrified of our shadows.’

“And he said, ‘Yes, I know that, and that’s why I admire your courage so much.’”  

This is how I think of Tennessee Williams, a brave artist who remained always faithful to his calling, continuing throughout his life to learn, explore, and grow as a writer, whatever temptations there may have been to stick to the tried-and-true.

I apologize for ever doubting. 

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'Cat On A Hot Tin Roof': Another Tepid Revival

If you want to get a sense of why Cat On A Hot Tin Roof is considered to be one of Tennessee Williams’s great accomplishments as a playwright, you might be better served by bypassing the current Broadway production and reading a copy of the script instead. 

This is a play that needs a deft hand at the helm, someone who can guide the actors into making subtle and unexpected changes in tone and mannerisms. Despite the grand themes the play wrestles with, at its heart this is a domestic drama.  As members of the audience, we must feel we are eavesdropping on some very painful and personal conversations between husband and wife and between father and son.  These moments of rare honesty occur in short outbursts, a sudden dropping of masks while playing out expected and well-practiced roles. It’s not for nothing that “mendacity” is one of the recurrent themes.      

A current example of how this kind of directing can be seen to powerful effect is in Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s handling of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson at Signature Theatre.  There the audience is privy to some very private and deeply moving conversations that occur unexpectedly and with little fuss. It is because they are unexpected that we feel their power. 

 

But the director of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Rob Ashford, is best known for his work as a choreographer and director of musicals—big numbers, big moves, lots of bombast.  There is no subtlety to this overly busy and noisy production, and the shadings and shifts in tone are completely lost. 

In addition, it is essential to have the right actors in the key roles of Margaret (“Maggie the Cat”) and of Big Daddy.  Each of these characters dominates a complete section of the play. 

Act I belongs to Maggie, who has dragged herself up from poverty and has married into a very wealthy family, lorded over by her father-in-law, Big Daddy.  Maggie’s husband Brick has fallen into a state of alcoholism and self-loathing, and blames Maggie for most of his problems.  The two have not shared a civil conversation or a bed for some time, but are now staying at the family manse to honor Big Daddy on his 65^th birthday.

Maggie is in their bedroom getting changed and trying to make conversation with her taciturn husband, who has broken a leg and has been holing himself in the room the whole evening, trying to drink himself into a stupor, the “click” that will bring him peace.

In the script of the play, Williams describes Maggie as “a pretty young woman, with anxious lines in her face…[with a] voice [that] is both rapid and drawling.  In her long speeches, she has the vocal tricks of a priest delivering a liturgical chant…”

As played by Scarlett Johansson, unfortunately, the best we can say about her is the opening phrase; she is a pretty young woman.  Now, Ms. Johansson really can act; she did splendidly in the brilliant production of Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge a couple of years back and walked away with a Tony Award for her efforts.  But she is unable to pull off the role of Maggie the Cat, in whom we need to see the mix of sultriness, intelligence, hunger, and ambition that Vivien Leigh gave to Ms. Johansson’s namesake, that other Scarlett in Gone With The Wind. 

By design—and because the only other person in the room has precious little to say—Maggie has to own Act I.  Her speeches need to encompass twittery filling-in-the-silent-spaces chit-chat and then shift, with just the right timing and tone, for what should be gaspingly stunning lines, like this one:  “I’m not living with you.  We occupy the same cage.” 

She also has one of the great exit lines of all time, in response to Brick’s sarcasm:

Brick:  How on hell on earth do you imagine that you’re going to have a child by a man who can’t stand you?

Maggie:  That’s a problem that I will have to work out.

Unfortunately, while the lines may be stunning, Ms. Johansson’s performance isn’t. Indeed, I was rather sympathetic to Benjamin Walker’s exasperated, passive aggressive portrayal of Brick, as his wife rattled on and on like a chattering magpie.

Things liven up somewhat in Act II, which is dominated by Ciarán Hinds, the Irish actor who has taken on the larger-than-life role of Big Daddy.  Mr. Hinds, whose theater work has been confined mostly to Ireland and England, seems to be the one cast member who is comfortable in the rather cavernous Richard Rodgers Theater.  (Everyone else, including Ms. Johansson, seems to be shouting in order to be heard in the upper reaches of the rear mezzanine.)  I love Act II, with its portrayal of a father and son trying to get at some semblance of truth in a world dominated by falsehoods and subterfuge.  Thanks to Mr. Hinds’s skillful performance, we can see in Big Daddy both the surface crudeness for which he is known, and the (nearly) unconditional love he has for his lost son. 

Much has been made of the relationship between Brick and his dead friend Skipper.  Both Maggie and Big Daddy assume there had been a sexual relationship, and that Brick is in a state of perpetual and unmitigated mourning over the loss of his lover. Mr. Ashford, the director, fed into this interpretation during some previews by having Skipper (Jordan Dean) appear on stage, visible only to Brick.

By opening night, Skipper, I’m told, thankfully disappeared. Which is as it should be.  Brick’s descent into darkness and self-destruction was forged not in sexual longing but in an act of betrayal.  This is a significant theme that Tennessee Williams had previously raised in A Streetcar Named Desire in the character of Blanche, forever haunted by what she views as an unforgivable act of betrayal that led to the death of her young husband many years before.  When this core revelation about Brick occurs in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, it should be a gut-wrenching, but, again, Mr. Ashford has imbued the production with so little variation in tone, that the moment passes and our attention shifts to Big Daddy’s realization of his own impending fate.

Ms. Johansson and Mr. Hinds are required to carry the bulk of the play on their shoulders, while Mr. Walker is there mostly to be talked about and fussed over.  The other roles—notably those of Big Mama (Debra Monk) and Brick’s brother (Michael Park) and sister-in-law (Emily Bergl), parents of the brood of “no-neck monsters,” who are in sycophantic attendance in order to establish their inheritance—are presented as exaggerated stereotypes, and the actors do what they can within the constraints that have been placed upon them.

Regrettably, this production of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof neither enlightens nor truly entertains, and a theater season that has been dominated by lackluster revivals continues in that vein.

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Tennessee Williams' Final Play: Much That Is Outrageous, Little That Is Austere

Poster by Noah Scalin

There are many pleasures to be found within the drug-addled fog of Tennessee Williams’ final and previously unproduced play, In Masks Outrageous and Austere, now having its world premiere at Culture Project.

This may not be the Williams of The Glass Menagerie or A Streetcar Named Desire, but I am happy to report that it is also not the Williams of The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, The Seven Descents of Myrtle, or Out Cry—to cite three others of his late plays that I saw in their original productions, all of which were leaden and pretentiously thick with “meaning.” 

With Masks, which has seen a number of tinkering hands since Williams’ death in 1983 (among them, Gore Vidal’s and Peter Bogdonovich’s), the playwright joins such writers as Edward Albee, John Guare, and Tony Kushner, who—with varying degrees of success—have attempted to mix elements of realism, surrealism, and absurdism into their work. I, for one, think he was on to something. 

I give a lot of credit to director David Schweizer, who recently helmed the intriguing, moving, and, yes, surreal revival of Rinde Eckert’s And God Created Great Whales (also for Culture Project). 

Schweizer has done an admirable job of pulling together the disparate elements of what you could never call a linear or clearly plotted play.  Instead, guided by the director’s sure hand, In Masks Outrageous and Austere invites us enter a world that owes much of its logic to pharmacological enhancement.  If you can accept that, you are in for a most interesting evening, filled with mystery, intrigue, corporate greed, paranoia, and murder—along with a surprising amount of humor and glorious turns of phrase. 

As we enter the theater, we find ourselves surrounded by LED screens and two-way mirrors, along with a sound system that is pumping out electronic music and bits of seemingly random dialog, while several Men-In-Black types move robotically about, speaking into headsets.

I have to say, my initial response was that this was a lot of smoke and (literally) mirrors designed to cover up the obvious flaws in what would turn out to be yet another dreary late Williams play.  Yet in Schweizer’s able hands, these elements greatly enhance the experience. 

The voices and the music and the images with which we are initially bombarded create a representation of what it must be like to have Attention Deficit Disorder, an apt metaphor for a play in which the main character is described as having “eyes blazin’ with Ritalin.” 

If you make the effort to filter out some of the noise, you will hear the voices going through a checklist of props needed for the play.  Among the calls for martini glasses and baseball caps, you will hear this exchange:

“Eyedrops.”

“Check.”

“Revolver.”

“Check.”

“Bullets.”

“Check.”

And so it begins.

The play opens, and we are…where?  None of the main characters seems to know—not Babe, the “richest woman in the world,” nor her much younger current husband Billy, a “distinguished minor poet,” as Babe calls him, nor Billy‘s much younger lover Jerry.  They have been whisked off to some secret location, where they are being watched over by a retinue of those Men-In-Black types, collectively referred to as “Gideons.” 

Since the audience is not presented with much of a roadmap to understanding what follows, allow me the indulgence of constructing my own meaning.

I take it that Babe’s status and image as the figurehead overseer of her late husband’s super-ultra-mega-global business conglomerate is being threatened by the very existence of Billy and Jerry, and that the Gideons have been dispatched to see to it that things are returned to the status quo.  Keeping Babe in an alcohol-and-drug-induced fog is essential to carrying out the plan; as Babe herself points out,  “A firearm in the hands of the demented should not be disregarded.” 

Think of all of this corporate intrigue as taking place on the outskirts of the play, while the action within is filtered through Babe’s befuddled and manipulated mind.  Here is where things get messy.  But if you are willing to go along for the ride, there’s a lot of fun to be had, what with the goings-on of Babe’s inattentive attendant Peg Foyle, Peg’s hunky boyfriend Joey, and, especially, “Mrs. Gorse dash Bracken from the invisible house next door” (yet another bon mot from Babe, who gets to relay many of Williams’ better linguistic creations). 

It’s OK to laugh.  This is funny stuff. 

At the performance I attended, veteran actress Shirley Knight, who during previews reportedly had trouble recalling her lines, nailed them—or perhaps wove any hesitations into the personality of her character—and she does splendidly as Babe, striving as best she can to make sense out of the nonsense that has become her world.  And don’t kid yourself; sober or un, Babe is no babe in the woods, but someone to be reckoned with. 

The rest of the cast members do equally well:  Robert Beitzel as the neurasthenic Billy, Sam Underwood as Jerry (with little enough to do beyond standing around and looking cute), Pamela Shaw as Peg, and Christopher Hallday as Joey. 

But it is Alison Fraser as Mrs. Gorse-Bracken (what a great name!) who truly embodies the goofy logic of the play. In spirit a character from Alice In Wonderland, she wanders in and out towing along or chasing after her mentally challenged and libido-driven son Playboy (Connor Buckley).  Things always liven up when she is at hand, regardless of the tenuous connection between what she says and whatever else is going on. 

You can also sense Williams getting quite a chuckle out of setting the play in a beach house of the mind, where one can take a warm ocean swim and watch the aurora borealis at the same time.  And, given the playwright’s predilection for hotel living, you can imagine the hallucinatory coming-into-being of the Gideons (all of those Bibles in all of those hotel rooms!)  If that’s not enough, the director himself has added still more elements, including video appearances by Buck Henry and Austin Pendleton, as contacts from the outside world. 

By the way, the title of the play comes from a poem by Elinor Wylie, "Now Let No Charitable Hope," which ends:

In masks outrageous and austere

The years go by in single file;

But none has merited my fear,

And none has quite escaped my smile.

It is the smile that lingers.  All in all, In Masks Outrageous and Austere is a boldly conceived and quite enjoyable theatrical experience.  And I ain’t just whistling “Dixie,” a remark that is relevant but which I believe I will leave unexplained.

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