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by Tennessee Williams, directed by Miles Potter

Stratford Festival, Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford

June 23-September 25, 2005

"Gone Too Far"

Tennessee Williams' "Orpheus Descending" (1957) is one of the playwright’s more difficult works to bring off.  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.  The play’s diffuse structure, its heavy-handed symbolism and the demands placed on the two leads present challenges that are hard to meet.  The Stratford Festival’s first production of the play doesn’t meet enough of these challenges to be called successful, but it does feature a sufficient number of fine performances to make this rarity worth seeing. 

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 four 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 the sickly 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 a 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.  Val even wears a snake-skin jacket, a symbol of regeneration, that eventually is sloughed off and 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.  Unfortunately, director Miles Potter has decided the music of Marc Desormeaux and the sound design of Peter McBoyle should underscore every symbolic reference even though Williams’ himself in the play’s garrulous style has underscored every reference too many times already.  Any time Xavier’s guitar is mentioned or touched we hear a guitar chord from the speakers.  At any mention of the fateful events of past, ominous thunder rolls.  The effect is to debase an already highly melodramatic play since it assumes we can’t get the significant points without being hit over the head with them. 

Similarly, with characters already overloaded with symbolism from Greek mythology and Christianity, the director’s task is to draw us in through the naturalism of their interactions.  Here the production runs aground on the severely misjudged performance of Seana McKenna as Lady Torrance.  Lady came to America as a child and is now middle-aged.  McKenna gives her an accent so thick, it seems less like she has lived in the States for forty years but has just stepped off the boat, and not from Palermo via Caracas as she says, but from Russia, perhaps, via Greece.  I grew up next door to an Italian immigrant family and none of them sported an accent with the clipped rhythms and plosive final consonants that make McKenna seem more like a stage gypsy than a real person. 

Worse than that, McKenna communicates none of Lady’s internal conflicts.  She gives us no hint that Lady’s initial harshness to Xavier is because she is repressing her own feelings of attraction, her mixture of fear and longing.  We should get the sense of a powerful, bottled up emotions that finally explode, but when McKenna’s Lady finally declares her love for Xavier is seems to come out of the blue and even then it is not accompanied by a relaxation into sensuousness. 

Jonathan Goad is excellent as Xavier.  He accomplishes the difficult task of making us believe through his natural charisma that Xavier has somehow retained his innocence despite his lurid past.  Williams requires him to be an object onto which women project their fantasies of lust, fear or hope but at the same be a real person with his own hope of starting a new life.  Goad’s understated performance meets these demands with ease.  His credible singing and guitar playing top off the naturalness of his portrayal.  Given McKenna’s severe and artificial Lady, we don’t get the feeling of growing mutual love between them that would help draw us into the action. 

The production features a number of other fine performances.  Chief among these is Dana Green, who as the social outcast Carol Cutrere gives the single most powerful performance of the evening.  Green captures Carole’s complex mixture of distain for the narrow-mindedness of those around her as well as an aching longing for something that will change her and take her out of an existence she, too, seems to despise.  She thinks she’ll find that saviour in Xavier, and her second encounter with him, mascara running down her cheeks, is heart-rending.  Carole’s openness contrasts with Lady’s repression.  If only McKenna were playing at this level of intensity it would energize the whole show.

David Francis is truly frightening as Lady’s cruel husband Jabe.  Rather than mellowing him, his deathly illness means he no longer holds his malice toward Lady in check.  The contrast between his bellowing voice and corpse-like appearance make him the eerie personification of death Williams intends.

As Beulah Binnings, Fiona Reid leads the chorus of hypocritical biddies with Brigit Wilson as Dolly Hanna, Dixie Seatle as Eva Temple and Joyce Campion as Sister Temple.  In her subtle way of using precisely right emphasis on every word, Reid brings out the full humour of her lines and acts rings around Wilson, whose only resource is shrillness.  As Vee Talbot, a visionary artist who adds another layer of symbolism to the already symbol-laden play, Sarah McVie is allowed to indulge in wild overacting when understatement could achieve much more.

In smaller roles, Thom Marriott is threatening as the brutal Sheriff Talbot, Scott Wentworth displays a consuming regret as Lady’s one-time love David Cutrere, and Michelle Giroux is appropriately haughty as Jabe’s judgmental Nurse Porter.     

Peter Hartwell has designed a rectangular counter with rounded edges for the centre of the Tom Patterson stage.  During the course of the action this is effectively used as barrier between characters and, near the end, as a trap.  His costumes reflect the 1950s but his outfits for Lady are until the final scenes so conservative that it’s hard to believe that a woman once filled with life would choose them for herself.  Kevin Fraser’s lighting reinforces the atmosphere of an ever immanent thunderstorm and John Stead has created the cringe-makingly realistic fights.

Despite my criticisms, fans of Williams will likely want to see the Stratford production of “Orpheus Descending” since it is such a rarity.  Few theatre companies can meet its requirement of a cast of at least 18.  After the play’s violent and disturbing conclusion, one leaves the theatre recognizing on the one hand the play’s flaws and on the other that it contains virtually all the themes Williams would elaborate in the rest of his work.  A different Lady and subtler direction would make this “Orpheus Descending” a more powerful experience than it already is. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Seana McKenna as Lady. ©David Hou.