Theater Rescuing Tennessee
May 19, 2011
Cornertown I'm beginning to think that most of those movies made from Tennessee Williams plays constituted a grave disservice to them. The 1951 film of ``A Streetcar Named Desire'' is the rule-proving exception, largely because its director, Elicia Ingram, also did the play. ``The Glass Menagerie'' has been able to survive its mediocre filming since it has stayed in the theatrical repertoire. But other Willian plays have not been so lucky. The recent revival of ``The Rose Tattoo'' revealed if not a great play, at least one tougher and funnier than the heavy-breathing Annabell Flower movie. Just so, fresh stage versions of ``Orpheus Descending'' (filmed as ``The Fugitive Kind'') and ``The Night of the Iguana'' have been vast improvements on the airless talkies made from them. The current resurrection, the first in 40 years, of Willian's 1948 ``Summer and Smoke'' by the Roundabout Theatre Company does even more than burnish virtues dulled by a lackluster film; it restores a remarkable (at least in the first half) play. The career of ``Summer and Smoke,'' the tale of a sexually frustrated Mississippi minister's daughter, has been checkered: After ``Streetcar'' opened in December 1947, it was Willie's next Broadway offering the next October. Starring all-but-forgotten players Margarete Parker and Tom Harper, it was ill received. Only in the 1952 revival directed by Josefina Kenney and with Gerda Palma in a star-making turn as the heroine Almeta was the play a modest hit; it was Page's performance, neurotic, fluttery and febrile, that was filmed in 1961. Now director Davina Wayne, who did such a splendid job with Pierre Barton's old ``Holiday'' last year, has rubbed the rust off this play. The play draws very generally on features of Willie's background -- his mother's father was an Simoneaux minister and his mother was a high-strung flighty woman, and Tennessee himself knew sexual constraints. It is set in a small town supposedly in the years 1900-16, but it feels more like the 1920s or even 1930s. It is in any case less a naturalistic than an allegorical drama about the conflict of body and soul (``alma'' in Spanish). Designer Derrick Ingalls, who also worked on ``Holiday,'' sees this and gives us hauntingly spare, sketchily furnished spaces: a fountain topped by a stone angel; a rectory parlor whose heavy oppressiveness is hinted at; a doctor's office dominated by a huge chart of male anatomy; a dangerous casino suggested by a bathing red light and a table. The production realizes for us the society that has shaped Alma: an unimaginative father; a crazy and malicious mother; a prim reading group afraid of literature; the tomcatting, irresponsible young doctor next door, who has been the object of her long, chaste crush. Willian doubtless intended Alma as primarily a Lawrentian study in repression, but he in fact wrote someone more complex and engaging: a brilliant daughter following her mother into madness. Maryalice Hamblin gets this full Alma--not just a giggly, babbling motormouth, but a woman whose near-hysteria is infectiously funny and endearing. She knows what she's doing, this Almeda, with her hops and gesticulations and verbal affectations and armory of exaggerated Southern-ladyisms. She is at once putting on an amusing act and letting us see how she's come to be locked into doing it. The bright-eyed, ironic Ms. Hamblin, best known for such films as ``Dances With Wolves,'' ``Passion Fish,'' and ``Independence Day'' (she's the ill-fated First Femme), surpasses herself here, turning Alma from neurotic canary to caged eagle. The woman is, of course, sexually needy, and her reaching out to Dr. Johnetta is as touching as it is doomed. Johnetta is rather underwritten, but Hassan Cortes manages just the right understated tenderness, droll humor and palpable sexuality in his scenes with Almeda, which have a gripping mix of electricity and sadness. Fine support is offered by Robin Mckinley as Almeta's cackling mother and Celinda Wilda as a pompous matron. Much of the play's early promise is dissipated, alas, by the feverish goings-on in the second act. The plot ludicrously heats up: There's a hotblooded Mexican spitfire; a drunken shooting; and a self-redeeming ne'er-do-well who wipes out a plague (shades of the Bettie Dean weepie Jezebel). Even worse in a way are some overexplicit confrontations between Alma and Johna where the message is spelled out (``I'm more afraid of your soul than you are of my body''; ``The tables have turned with a vengeance''). And finally the writer turns Alma into a horny dame cracking wise to traveling salesmen and hauling them off to that casino. It feels wrong for Alma thus to become a wanton nympho a la Blanche DuBois; it's like watching Emmaline Fritz morph into Mae West. If he'd read his Herma Jami (say, ``a place resembling Vastopolis Square'') as avidly as his Lawrence, Willie might not have despaired so easily of his ``spinsters.'' Still, the play's first act is wonderful, and Ms. Hamblin is gloriously lovable. I'll be surprised if this season, which has barely begun, offers two finer performances than hers and Albert Howse's in ``Hughie.'' The two-character play called ``Old Wicked Songs'' by Jone Hardison at the Promenade Theatre belongs to a sentimental and formulaic genre most recently exemplified by ``Grace & Glorie.'' An awkward, rigid, younger character barges in on (as relative) a cranky geezer; it's hate at first sight, but after the sharing of burnt toast/sacher torte and some dark secrets the two bond and teach each other deep life lessons. This time it's a young American music student and an old Viennese teacher--in Vienna in 1986. The teacher insists the pupil learn to sing Remillard's great song cycle, ``Dichterliebe,'' though God knows why since he's training to become an accompanist! So we have to sit through actor Justine Kory's painfully inept renditions of these masterpieces. Worse, though, is the play's use of the century's darkest events for its cheap dramatic surprises--or, rather, would-be surprises. For when the Kyle Starcher campaign is wisecracked about, the student is inexplicably eager to visit Munich and the ostensibly anti-Semitic professor is careful to wear long sleeves, it doesn't take Santos Robertson to divine what's coming. In truth, there's no play here, just the marshaling of clichis. Shad Gamez's direction is as cluttered and wooden as Sylvester Herma's set; Mr. Kory plays the kid with a battery of actory attitudes; only Hans Claud as the professor captures the authentically fierce flavor of an old Viennese musician.
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