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by Tennessee Williams, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte

The Wooster Group, Fleck Dance Theatre, Toronto

March 28-31, 2012

“Vieux Carré Finally Finds Success”

Vieux Carré is one of Tennessee Williams’ most famous flops.  It opened on Broadway on May 11, 1977 and closed after five performances.  The Wooster Group, an experimental theatre company from New York, resurrected the play in 2009 and it is now being presented as part of Harbourfront’s World Stage.  In purging the play of any embalming effect of period sets or costumes, the production reveals the work as the fascinating piece it is--messy, perhaps, but as messy as life.  Yet, the production itself is unnecessarily elaborate.  Frequently one feels that the company could use less effort to achieve a greater effect.  It turns out the once-derided play does not need as much mechanical life-support as The Wooster Group gives it.

The autobiographical play describes the life of a young unnamed, would-be writer from St. Louis who has moved to the Old Quarter (“Vieux Carré”) of New Orleans in the 1930s.  There he becomes involved in the mournful lives of the tenants of a dilapidated rooming house.  Williams began the play in 1938 when he actually lived in the rooming house he describes, but did not return to it and radically revise it until 1973.  This circumstance lends the play the strange aspect of both anticipating and reflecting upon the themes and types of characters who would appear in the major plays of the 1940s and ‘50s.  Like The Glass Menagerie, Vieux Carré is a memory play with the Writer at the centre recalling his time at 722 Toulouse Street and how he grew from innocence in all aspects of life to maturity. 

How do you stage a play set inside and outside multiple rooms and hallways of a two-storey house with attic?  Clearly, only a non-realistic staging will work, and, since the action takes place in the Writer’s memory, realism would work against the play’s nature.  The Wooster Group has completely remodelled the stage of the Fleck Dance Theatre.  It has been lowered and a thrust added so that the auditorium can be entered only by the upper entrances.  On the stage are three parallel steel piers, two of which can be moved to adjoin each other, with a walkway the three from behind.  These piers are used to suggests the various floor plans of each storey of the house. 

Undercutting any dreamy notion of memory, however, is the very high tech look of the set, littered like a teenaged boy’s bedroom with props, with the lighting grid visible above and Rube Goldberg-like rigging overhead of lights and buckets using cords and various suspension devices.  There are three video screens above the back walkway and space for a videographer to move his equipment between the piers.  Behind all this is an electronic control centre manned by three technicians.  Unlike Robert Lepage’s tech-heavy productions, this one does not look elegant and attractive but rather deliberately chaotic and clumsy and, unlike Lepage, seems to shout “avant-garde” rather too loudly.

The main flaw of the production is how seldom director Elizabeth LeCompte actually uses the various possibilities all this technology provides.  For most of the play’s two hours, the two side video screen do nothing but show images of hanging sandbags or of screens and only occasionally reflect the weather.  A small portable TV set on the floor plays images either of fire or water, but that’s it, and it is too small to make much effect.  A second small TV screen way up in the stage right corner of the wings shows miscellaneous clips from TV shows and is seemingly irrelevant to the action. 

LeCompte focusses almost entirely on the central screen.  Here she sometimes combines video of the Writer (Ari Fliakos) with film to create images of him giving or receiving fellatio, with the screen clearly representing his imagination.  Sometimes it depicts an old woman (the Writer’s grandmother) passing by a curtained window, a signal that the Writer wonders if he is being judged.  The central screen is also the only place where we see spinster sisters Mary Maude and Miss Carrie (both played by Alan Boyd Kleiman).  At one point is plays a surrealistic cartoon that does not enhance either the themes or the story of the play.  The only clever use of the stage left video screen occurs when the black maid Nursie (Kaneza Schaal) sits behind it and the screen shows a 1930s-style caricature of a black woman.  Otherwise, the most effective use of projections and video occurs in the last fourth of the play when the Writer has finally found himself and he types out a torrent of words--shown as gobbledegook on the central screen but revealed as the text he is speaking on the far wall behind the control centre. 

When the play premiered it was criticized as a plotless “series of vignettes”.  The great virtue of the Wooster Group’s production is to disprove this claim.  By stripping down the externals of production (though substituting her own), LeCompte demonstrates that the play has a strong throughline made up of two intertwining developments.  On the one hand, the play clearly emphasizes the Writer’s growth both sexually, socially and artistically so that by the end he has moved beyond the need for the protection and inspiration that the rooming house provides.  On the other hand, the play clearly depicts the decline and fall of the microcosm of society that the house represents, with all of the inhabitants we first meet either leaving or dying by the end.  The final words of the play, “The house is empty”, is a factual statement that resonates with symbolic meaning. 

Unlike many tech-heavy productions, the technological paraphernalia does not overwhelm the acting.  In fact, as in a conventional production, it is the acting itself that draws us in and carries us through.  Fliakos is an ideal choice as the Writer, a young man with a cold heart.  Fliakos under LeCompte’s direction shows that the Writer’s inability to accept himself as gay is what blocks his ability to write.  Once he accepts himself, his almost pathological taciturnity at the beginning becomes a flow of words.  Fliakos also conveys the quite subtle change in the Writer who must metamorphose his coldness of heart into a compassionate objectivity in order to become a writer.  In typical anachronistic fashion, LeCompte equips the Writers with a computer keyboard unattached to any computer.  By hitting a key strobes flash and he can pause a scene or even change scenes.  This is LeCompte’s way of reminding us that we are in the Writer’s mind and that mind’s recreation his experience.

Scott Shepherd gives a dazzling performance in two completely opposite roles--Nightingale the effeminate gay painter and Tye McCool, the tough-guy bouncer at a Vieux Carré nightclub.  Nightingale, with his long hair, makeup, kimonos and fan  is the principle Southern belle of the play, looking forward to and reflecting Blanche DuBois of A Streetcar Named Desire.  His insatiable sexual nature is not-so-sublty indicated, as with Greek statyrs, by a phallus protruding from his pants.  He is disliked by all the roomers for his affectations and for the tuberculosis he carries but brushes off as a “summer cold”.  He alienates the Writer by making a play for him, but eventually the Writer sees the tragedy in this sorry figure.  As Tye, Shepherd is a hopped-up slob who abuses the vulnerable Jane Sparks (Kate Valk), who has taken him in for companionship.  The Writer is both attracted and repelled by Tye.  Tye’s horrified description of the grotesque murder of the club’s star singer proves that he does, at bottom, have a some sense of morality.

Valk herself also plays two contrasting roles--Jane, a society girl from New York, who is dying of leukemia and Mrs. Wire, prying, witchlike proprietor of the rooming house.  For unknown reasons, LeCompte has decided that Valk should play the gumbo-making New Orleanian Mrs. Wire with a New York accent and Jane with a Southern accent.  This bizarre choice severs Mrs. Wire from the house and from its location, though both connections are symbolically important.  Valk is superb as Jane, lending her the languorous sensuality the a femme fatale of film noir, though, in this case, she does not endanger the hero but encourages him to flee the suffocating confines of the house.  Sad to say, she is not effective at all in the plum role of Mrs. Wire.  Problems with her mic often made her inaudible, but even when audible her accent and rushed delivery made most of the character’s lines unclear, a total contrast to her technique as Jane. 

In another odd choice, LeCompte has Schaal deliver her lines not in a Southern accent but in contemporary Valley Girl diction replete with uptalk and vocal fry.  This is another conscious anachronism, but unfortunately, it also obscures whatever Schaal says. 

I am extremely grateful that The Wooster Group has rescued Vieux Carré from oblivion.  There are many plays of Williams’ supposed dotage that deserve reassessment.  Yet, because LeCompte employs the complex technological framework of the production more to decorative than essential effect, I could not help thinking that the play would be even more effective in a non-naturalistic production that eschewed such self-conscious avant-garderie.  The actors’ performances so draw us into the action that they make the elaborate external high-tech accoutrements seem like unnecessary 21st-century bric-a-brac.  I hope that this production will inspire someone to mount Vieux Carré again in a production where elegant simplicity is its chief characteristic.       

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Ari Fliakos as The Writer. Photo ©2012 Franck Beloncle.

For tickets, visit www.harbourfrontcentre.com/worldstage2012.