Orpheus Descending
by Tennessee Williams
Photos by John Armstrong
Critics' Reviews
by Richard Green - Talkin' Broadway
Today I am waiting for a man to come and tear up the basement floor of my home, and replace a rusted-out 109 year-old drain pipe. I am fairly certain this repairman will not be the tall, dark and handsome Valentine Xavier of the current Orpheus Descending. But there are other parallels between the latest production of Tennessee Williams' near-great love story and my household travails that may be worth examining.
In the play, when handsome, soulful Valentine (Tyler Vickers) comes to lay some pipe for Lady Torrance (the fantastic Donna Parrone), he actually appears somewhat over-qualified for the task. For, unlike the greatest settings of Williams (or my basement), the household of Lady Torrance seems to drain perfectly well. The dark Southern Gothic overtones that accrete in plays like The Glass Menagerie, Suddenly Last Summer, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, A Streetcar Named Desire or Summer and Smoke are cleanly drained away in this play, primarily by the satirical interpretations of key supporting players under the direction of Carolyn Hood. And Ms. Parrone is more than passionate enough to do battle with dark elements that remain in her home in Two Rivers County, Mississippi. It all serves to make the usual Williams poignancy rather like the show's mythical mascot: a bird that can never come to rest on this Earth.
About Ms. Parrone: she dances, she spits fire, and pleads and swoons with magnificent panache. It may be the best performance of the year. But, as directed, her chief adversaries (the estimable Kim Furlow and Julie Venegoni) give us very little reason to despise the dark side of the South the way the playwright did. Their town ladies come out just a half-step above the household maids of 1920s Broadway who picked up the phone to tell the caller (and the audience) that the mistress was not taking any visitors, what with that terrible business in the papers and all. At least we can applaud their unbending loyalty to their director. Williams' better-known sources of repression, Mrs. Wingfield, Mrs. Venable, Brick, Blanche or Alma, will always be stopped-up like rusted sewer pipes. Here, information (and passion) flows out all too smoothly through the pipeline of light-comedy. But the times they are a-changin', and my own basement repairman will certainly be using lightweight PVC to replace 19th century cast iron, prone as it was to decomposition.
And yet, and yet. William Burch is horrifyingly steeped in the Gothic idiom as Lady's dying husband, and Ruth Heyman is phenomenal as the sheriff's wife, whose supernatural blind spells recur whenever she's passing Valentine's workplace. Julie Layton (as Carol Cutrere) and Norman McGowan (Uncle Pleasant) are terrific as social outcasts. Jenn Bock is excellent as the all-seeing nurse, and Rosemary Christian and Dorothy Davis (as the Temple sisters) are great as enforcers of society's code. So perhaps the ultimate blame for the frequent listlessness of Orpheus Descending goes to Mr. Williams himself: the tragic outsiders are too evenly matched against the smug insiders in this petty fiefdom. It drains the drama, and the final terror (and most of the tension) seem patched onto a doomed romance.
Still, I hope there are plenty of people who like to puzzle over theater's near-misses, both current and historic. And any chance to see Ms. Parrone take on a great dramatic role is a bargain at twice the price.
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A Polish guy walks into a theater...
by Bob Wilcox - West End Word
Who knew that someone named David Ives is Polish?
Playwright Ives wrote the delightful short sketches grouped together under the title All in the Timing, stuffed full of hilarious word play, sly literary references and sharp cultural observations; and another group of brief comic observations called The Lives of the Saints.
Now Ives has outed his ethnicity in a play called Polish Joke.
Questions of identity have permeated modern literature, art and theater — and philosophy, religion, politics, psychology and just about anything else you can name. Ives takes identity head on in its most simplistic form, ethnic stereotypes. And he’s an equal opportunity offender — Polish, WASP, Irish and Jewish suffer every cliché about ethnic groups that he can squeeze into the two hours of a play.
As with his other plays, Ives entertains us with a baker’s dozen of short scenes. But this time, instead of being discrete, the scenes hang together as they follow the life of one young man.
We meet Jasiu as a boy sitting at the feet of his Uncle Roman in the uncle’s driveway on a Saturday afternoon in a Polish neighborhood. The uncle is explaining to the boy what it means to be Polish — why he drinks egg and salt in his beer, why Polish jokes are funny (they’re true), and other essential points of the heritage that defines his identity. Frequent feelings of hopelessness and meaninglessness, of the suspicion that everything eventually goes bad, are part of that heritage. It’s the melancholy that lurks behind and occasionally seeps through all the greatest comedy.
In the current production of Polish Joke at HotCity Theatre, Christopher Hickey does a lovely job at each stage of Jasiu’s life, making fully realized transitions from child to adolescent to adult.
Hickey is the only actor in the production who plays just one character. The other four performers portray a variety of people in Jasiu’s life. Most of them are shallow stereotypes, even broad caricatures. But the actors’ transitions from one to another are just as complete as Hickey’s transitions within his one character.
Greg Johnston starts as Uncle Roman, very clear and funny in his explanations of things Polish, though a little too rushed the evening I was there to extract the full measure of the comedy (it’s all in the timing). But Johnston is brilliant as the sympathetic priest in the seminary that the adolescent Jasiu attends, and where the young man faces an identity crisis when he loses his vocation for the priesthood.
Jasiu tries a new identity, changing his name (as his creator Ives had done) to something blandly WASPish. But his first job interview sees right through the name and his brilliant academic record to the Polish core. Larissa Forsyth, who had already delighted as the little neighbor with whom Jasiu played doctor, now is the brittle, condescending interviewer, flying the colors of her Mayflower heritage. Forsyth, who brings total conviction and perfect pitch for style to every role she plays, also becomes Jasiu’s Jewish fiancee. Rachel is not a stereotype but a deeply sympathetic character. Her ethnicity takes its licks from Johnston as Rachel’s father and, especially, Lavonne Byers as her mother. Byers gets major help from the costume provided by Laura Hanson, whose creations multiply the fun throughout the evening.
After Jasiu encounters a family of Polish emigres who have tunneled from Poland to New York — Byers again as the woebegone wife, B. Weller as the eager husband — he decides that the only way to step up a rung on the ethnic ladder is to move to Ireland. This occasions a broadly comic scene in an Irish travel agency, with Forsyth as a dewy-eyed Irish maiden, Byers as a whisky-swigging and potato-eating Irish matron, and Weller as the pumped-up head of the agency. Some of Weller’s habits as an actor limit him in this role, but they work well for him when he and Byers later do a doctor-and-nurse routine right out of vaudeville.
Accompanied by Christopher Mannelli’s witty sound design that travels from polkas to Bartok and beyond, the fine cast at HotCity, under William Grivna’s sharp direction, keep the laughs coming as meteorological mishaps lead Jasiu back to his true identity and a sweet ending. In Polish Joke, Ives gives us the pleasures we expect from his word play and his pictures of human folly, with the added satisfaction of his thoughtful, semi-autobiographical exploration of the quest for one’s true self.
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By Deanna Jent - RFT
Published: November 22, 2006
Super-sized characters populate Orpheus Descending: the simmering, sexually repressed Lady; a "conjure man" who shrieks Indian war cries; a crazy rich girl trying to drown her sorrows in thrills and booze; the town visionary who keeps losing her eyesight. Toss in a couple of faded Southern belles and their doofusly named husbands (Pee Wee and Dog), add the stereotypic Sheriff and a mean-spirited control freak fighting death, stir in the catalyst (a guitar-playing, hot-blooded drifter named Valentine), and you've got a recipe for explosive passion. Never a writer accused of subtlety, Tennessee Williams stuffs this play with symbolism, pulling from Greek and Christian mythology as well as American iconography (it's not a coincidence that Williams wanted Elvis Presley to portray Valentine in the movie based on the play).
* Hell = other people: Ruth Heyman (left) and Tyler Vickers (right) in <i>Orpheus Descending</i>.
Hell = other people: Ruth Heyman (left) and Tyler Vickers (right) in Orpheus Descending.
Details:
Through December 2. Tickets are $20 ($15 for students and seniors). Call 314-289-4060 or visit www.hotcitytheatre.org.
HotCity Theatre's production of Orpheus Descending, directed by Carolyne Hood, embraces the lurid aspects of Williams' script, particularly in the lighting. Cued by Valentine's remark that "we live in a world of light and shadow," Doug Provost creates an expressionistic design that contrasts with the realistic elements of set and costume. Using dramatic color shifts, sharp patterns and an almost constant movement of light and shadow around the characters, Provost creates psychologically driven lighting changes that are often distracting, pulling the audience out of compelling moments of conflict. Combined with the sometimes overwrought sound effects (an unexplained siren, a heartbeat), the highly dramatic lighting design pushes the play toward melodrama.
What keeps the production grounded are the rock-solid performances provided by the acting ensemble. Standouts include Julie Layton, who plays Carol Cutrere (a Blanche DuBois doppelgänger) as a fluttering bird trying to escape the cage of society. She shares a secret bond with Uncle Pleasant, eerily portrayed by Norman McGowan. Both William Burch (as Lady's controlling husband Jabe) and Jared Sanz-Agero (Sheriff Talbot) create authentic and ultimately frightening characters, which are complemented by the seemingly sweet but truly bigoted Beulah (Kim Furlow) and Dolly (Julie Venegoni).
Anchoring the show are Donna Parrone, Tyler Vickers and Chopper Leifheit. Parrone, as Lady Torrance, convincingly embodies a woman trapped in a loveless marriage who finds hope for a new life. Vickers, as the enigmatic Valentine, stirs buried passion in Lady Torrance. But it's Leifheit, playing Lady's former lover, who most convincingly exposes the grief and regret underpinning the lives of these characters. When Lady reveals secrets from their past, his simple response — "I didn't know" — is heart-breaking.
While the characters are super-sized in their passion and conflicts, this is not fast-food theater. Trimmed to a digestible length (under two and a half hours with intermission), the production is a multi-course meal that continues to improve as the evening progresses. The exposition-heavy first act is slow, but once the show settles into the main story, a sense of urgency kicks in, leading to an astonishing conclusion. All of Williams' metaphors and references pay off. The trapped bird continues banging on the bars of her cage; Lady's hope is dashed on Easter Saturday through a sacrificial act; and Valentine, who referred to himself as someone "who had never been branded," sees an end to those days.
Williams reportedly worked on Orpheus Descending for seventeen years, which may explain why many of the characters and situations seem to echo his better-known works. Orpheus may be most similar to A Streetcar Named Desire: In each, a sexually provocative outsider is ultimately expelled to maintain the status quo. Williams' critique of a community that values conformity over individuality is heard most clearly when Beulah points out that "ostracizing only works if everyone cooperates." In the world of this play, those who don't cooperate with maintaining society as sanctioned by the powers that be are pushed to the edges or eliminated. Orpheus Descending is a tragedy not just because the characters working to change their lives are unsuccessful, but because the questions raised about the tyranny of compromise remain relevant today.