The Lost Menagerie
EgoPo's production of Williams' messy Vieux Carré is an easy recommendation for the playwright's hardcore fans.
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On my personal theatrical honor roll, I reserve a special place for directors who rescue the plays of Tennessee Williams. Not Streetcar or Glass Menagerie, those masterpieces don't want for a champion. But the messy, fragmentary late works require a leap of faith. Are they worth it? I think so.
And they don't get much messier than Vieux Carré, whose 1977 Broadway run was an inglorious 17 performances. (Williams had slightly better luck with his next-and-last Broadway offering, 1980's Clothes for a Summer Hotel, which made it to 21.) In this autobiographical memory piece, a writer (standing in for TW, obviously) retraces his formative stay in a bleak New Orleans boardinghouse. There, he hooked up with a dying artist; befriended a woman, also terminally ill, who was locked in an abusive relationship with a carnival barker/hustler; suffered through the brutality of his crazy landlady (who herself is in a strange symbiosis with her black nurse/housekeeper); and came to recognize his own homosexuality — all of which fuel his creative fires.
Moments of Vieux Carré seem like the kind of parody Christopher Durang might write. Yet there are at least as many sections of haunting beauty, and lines where Williams' brilliance is in full flower. Most of all, his ability to comprehend human need is incomparable. "I have been betrayed by susceptibility to touch," says one character, and the vivid sense we have of human flesh — throbbing, decaying, stimulating — is astonishing.
Director Lane Savadove successfully captures much of this in a production full of ideas. The visual imagery is especially impressive — capitalizing on a very deep stage, set designer Daniel Soule gives us a telescoping railroad flat full of bits and pieces of furniture (beds, mostly). Beautifully lit by Matt Sharp, it's exactly the kind of ghostly maze the play requires. And the 12 actors in the ensemble make fully committed choices.
This production is an easy recommendation for hardcore Williams fans (and I count myself among them).To the rest of you, I'll say that by most normal critical criteria, Vieux Carré cannot be called a successful play (and I'm sure many would consider it a fiasco).
Yet no writer has ever looked more unflinchingly and compassionately at loneliness and human folly, and for that alone, Tennessee Williams goes straight to the top of my pantheon.
Vieux Carré
Through Dec. 22, EgoPo Productions, Christ Church Neighborhood House, 20 N. American St., 215-552-8773, egopo.org
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Iknew Tennessee well and yes thera re maybe 200 unproduced plays extant--some very short some fragments. Thank u for yr good work