Vital vignettes

Tennessee Williams' short stuff

by Bill Rodriguez

THE TENNESSEE WILLIAMS SUMMER FESTIVAL. Featuring The Long Goodbye, Auto da Fé, The Unsatisfactory Supper, The Lady of Larkspur Lotion, The Case of the Crushed Petunias, Wagon Full of Cotton, This Property is Condemned, Steps Must Be Gentle, IRise In Flame, Cried the Phoenix, and Lord Byron's Love Letter. Presented by 2nd Story Theatre at the Meeting House at Tiverton Four Corners on July 30 and 31.

If Tennessee Williams had only slipped into his post-Night of the Iguana creative decline a few decades later, he could have had a rollicking second career writing self-help books. For his family, to be merely "dysfunctional" would have been something to aspire to. In the rarely performed short plays 2nd Story Theatre is staging, we get glimpses of them all. His mother, the prim and proper daughter of a rector; father, a boorish skirt-chaser who called him "Miss Nancy"; sister, a troubled young woman who was lobotomized to make her less troublesome; Williams himself, an effeminate hypochondriac tormented and repressed by his homosexuality.

Director Pat Hegnauer has assembled a wide-ranging showcase of his short work, judging by the second half of the Tennessee Williams Summer Festival I attended. (Both programs of five mini-plays will be performed on the closing weekend.) You'll laugh, you'll sigh. Reeking of magnolias and sweat, the effete and self-deluded denizens of Williams' world strut or fret themselves into these vignettes to argue or bleed for us.

Performances are in the Meeting House of the Tiverton Four Corners Art Center, and the set design by Julia Bernart and John Montano provides a simple backdrop appropriate for the diverse Southern gothic moods on display. A weathered and worn once-white colonnade is spaced across a wall and two screen doors. The white paint is as chipped on two bent-metal chairs that are nearly as battered as the characters.

"Festival Two" opens and closes with Williams going to extremes. The first piece is Auto da Fé, about a most disgruntled postal worker (Luis Astudillo) and the mother (Rae Mancini) who tries to calm him down. Elois has come across a pornographic photo that slipped out of an envelope at work, and for the past 10 days he has been in turmoil. Astudillo plays him as a hopping mad hysteric, far more stridently than necessary. But the payoff is convincing with this man obsessed by the need for purity amidst the world's corruption.

Both the playwright and Astudillo take a different tack toward outlandishness, to enjoyable effect, in the final play, The Case of the Crushed Petunias. He plays a young man who walks into the Massachusetts notions shop of one Dorothy Simple (Alyn Carlson-Webster), confessing brightly to having trampled her orderly rows of petunias overnight. Williams takes satiric whacks at such prissy folk as his mother and their timid ways, when the man offers to repay her with wild rose seeds. Here Astudillo's high-energy comes across as winningly, and appropriately, as Carlson-Webster's coy joy at being liberated.

In The Unsatisfactory Supper, hard-working man of the house Archie Lee (Michael Sloan) is furious that his collard greens were undercooked by Aunt Rose (Bernice Bronson), his houseguest for the past year. His wife Baby Doll (Karen Robinson) tries to mollify him, but he's adamant that it's time for other relatives to take over. There's good ensemble work here, and the melodramatic resolution works better in this short piece than it would have with the momentum of a full-length play behind it.

More family relationships come up in The Long Goodbye. Joe (Dave Rabinow) is moving out with his share of the insurance money from dearly departed mother (Bronson). Sister Myra (Robinson) has grown coarse and mercenary, he judges, when she doesn't see through the superficiality of her coarse but socially advantageous gentleman caller, Bill (Stephen Palmer). There are some wonderful Williams lines here. The mother discusses freedom and how sometimes the only way you have time for it is to die; and, centrally, Joe calls life "one long, long goodbye."

The best long, Williamsesque monologue of the evening is delivered intelligently by John Capalbo, a loquacious writer manqué in The Lady of Larkspur Lotion. Never has Williams's favorite defense mechanism, self-delusion, been on more convincing display than by this spirited charlatan with no brilliant 780-page manuscript about to be published. His female counterpart is the faded Southern flower Mrs. Hardwick-Moore, given agreeable personality by Mancini, who claims to have her quarterly income delayed from a Brazilian rubber plantation. They are in a French Quarter rooming house that is not much better than a brothel, where only such face-saving imaginings can keep them one up on these cockroaches, who have the advantage of being able to fly.

Despite all the excesses of his personal life, at his best Tennessee Williams as an artist had a good sense of proportion and perspective. These short examples of that skill don't overstay their welcome, under the attentive care of 2nd Story.