Reviews 2002
Reviews 2002
✭✭✭✩✩
by Tennessee Williams, directed by Rita Spannbauer
Alumnae Theatre, Toronto
January 25-February 9, 2002
"Into the Underworld"
Tennessee Williams' "Orpheus Descending" (1957) is one of the American master's lesser-known works. Written between two of his hits, "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1955) and "Sweet Bird of Youth" (1959), it has never known the success of either. It is a rewrite of his first Broadway play, "Battle of Angels" (1940), and was made into the film "The Fugitive Kind" (1959) starring Marlon Brando. Now a well-directed production at the Alumnae Theatre featuring two superb performances allows Toronto audiences to judge for themselves whether this neglect is justified or not.
My answer is that it not, though it is not hard to see why theatres balk at producing it. First of all it requires a cast of 18 when there are only three major roles. Its eight scenes already show the diffuse structure that will characterize Williams' later plays. Carol Cutrere, who we are led to believe will be the major female character hardly appears in the second and third acts. And mythological parallels, normally located just under the naturalistic surface of the action, are, as in the title, made far more explicit. The play bears so many similarities to other of Williams' works it is easy to think that the playwright treated the same themes more economically elsewhere.
Despite all this, in the hands of an able director like Rita Spannbauer "Orpheus Descending" proves to be an exciting play. Like so many other Williams' plays "Orpheus" concerns the arrival of a young, handsome drifter in a small Southern town and the emotions and jealousies his arrival stirs up. Unlike Williams' best-known plays, "Orpheus" begins with an unusually long exposition. We are introduced to eight of the local biddies gossiping in the Torrance Mercantile Store as they set up a buffet lunch for owner Jabe Torrance's return from hospital. After the arrival of the local outcast, Carol Cutrere, they become a kind of chorus recounting the past history of Jabe's wife Lady and her father. Lady's father who came to America from Italy set up a wine-garden that local thugs burnt down, her father with it, for his having served liquor to a black man. Now Lady, trapped in a loveless marriage with Jabe, dreams of setting up a "confectionery", her own version of her father's wine-garden, in the mercantile store.
Into this setting of hatred where events seem on the verge of recurrence steps drifter with the highly symbolic name Valentine Xavier. Classical Hades was surrounded by the river Lethe and the Styx. The location of Williams' story is Two-River County. Val is the Orpheus of the title with a guitar instead of a lyre. He has had an affair with Carol but he thinks he has put that "corruption" behind him. In this hell he finds Lady, his Eurydice, the only woman he has ever loved. But as his last name suggests, Val is not merely Orpheus but Christ. Unsurprisingly, the last part of the play takes place on Holy Saturday, the time of Christ's Harrowing of Hell when, according to the Gospel of Nicodemus, he brought salvation to Adam and Eve, the prophets and patriarchs. Val even wears a snake-skin jacket, a symbol of regeneration, that is passed on to another of the "fugitive kind".
The linking of Orpheus and Christ is fascinating in itself, but also gives the play a heaviness than only an emphasis on the naturalism of the action can overcome. This is just the course director Rita Spannbauer takes, drawing us in through the immediacy of the characters' emotions. This clear-sighted approach allows the symbolism to amplify rather than crush the reality of the stage action. Williams' stage directions ask for a non-naturalistic set, but luckily Doug Robinson deviates from this to create the feel of a very specific place and time as do Peter De Freitas' costumes with the one exception of Carol Cutrere's that make her seem like a modern woman trapped in an earlier time, a point supported by the text. Michael V. Spence's lighting is best when capturing mood or giving emphasis as in the multiple spotlights used in the early choral sequence.
The cast's abilities range from adequate to excellent. Tricia Brioux gives a powerful performance as Lady Torrance. Brioux is fully alive to the internal conflicts of Lady--duty to Jabe versus attraction to Val, hope for the future versus a sense of sense of doom--whose control over long-repressed emotion becomes ever more tenuous. Carol Cutrere is Lady's opposite. Her open expression of thought and desire has made her an outcast. She seeks a moral focus she thinks she will find in Val. Tracy Rankin masterfully captures Carol's complex mixture of desperation and disdain.
Williams has made the third key role of Val almost impossible to cast. He must seem to have retain his innocence despite having had a lurid past. He must exude an animal magnetism that makes men assume the worst and women feel unsafe if alone him. Yet he must also carry the symbolic weight of a saviour. Other production have foundered here and so does this. Sean Curran is a good actor but is just not right for this role. The innocence and otherworldliness necessary for the symbolism is there but the charisma that everyone speaks of is not. The effect is of a neutral character of whom the others project their fantasies. This is part of what the play asks for, but not all.
Among the secondary figures, Sandi Ross is impressive as the possessed Conjure Woman ("Conjure Man" in the original), and I was glad Spannbauer gave her a song to sing as an interlude to give wider play for her talent. Other standouts include Paul Soren, finely distinguishing the role of the Jabe from that of Carol's brother David; Anne Harper as Vee Talbott, a visionary painter gradually going blind; Martyn Wolfman as her redneck husband the Sheriff, Elaine Lindo as the Beulah, the chief biddy of the town; and Jan Fine and Jabe's Nurse who can barely conceal her disgust at Lady's affair with Val.
No lover of Tennessee Williams will want to miss the chance to see a play of his so seldom performed. It is perhaps his fullest statement on the nature of the artist and his role in society. While not all the demands of the play are fully met, the riveting performances of Brioux and Rankin and Spannbauer's clear direction keep the level of intensity high and bring this nightmarish world to vivid life.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Tricia Brioux. ©2009 Joshua Meles.
2002-02-06
Orpheus Descending