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by Tennessee Williams, directed by Miles Potter

Mirvish Productions/Manitoba Theatre Centre,

Royal Alexandra Theatre, Toronto

January 7-February 11, 2007

Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending (1957), his rewrite of his first Broadway play Battle of Angels (1940), still has all the hallmarks of a first play.  The structure is too diffuse, the plot too melodramatic, the symbolism too heavy-handed.  Based on his hit 2005 production for Stratford, Miles Potter’s production has somehow in transferring the action from the 481-seat Tom Patterson Theatre to the 1500-seat Royal Alex, from a thrust to a proscenium stage, completely lost the inexorable build-up of tension that made the play so gripping at Stratford.

Most of the Stratford cast is intact.  Jonathan Goad plays the attractive stranger Valentine Xavier, whose mere presence in a small southern town causes women to swoon and men to seethe with jealousy.  Williams saddles Xavier with the symbolism of both Orpheus of Greek myth and Christ in this allegory about the artist in society.  Goad, however, exudes enough natural charisma to change Xavier from a symbol into a believable and intriguing character.  Unfortunately, Seana McKenna as Lady Torrance, the central female figure trapped in a loveless marriage, gives such a mannered, severe performance that the electricity that should crackle between her and Xavier never materializes.  This leaves Dana Green, as a social outcast who worships Xavier, to give the evening’s most powerful performance by fully capturing her tortured character’s explosive mix of public disdain and private self-loathing.               

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-01-11.

Photo: Dana Osborne and Jonathan Goad.