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| 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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