Dangerous Ladies (If They Need To Be)

Women Who Win in Williams

by Augustin J Correro

  In one of Tennessee Williams’ most famous plays, Maggie ponders the titular question: “What its the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?” She muses “…Just staying on it, I guess, as  long as she can…” The notion of survival as a kind of victory reoccurs in Williams’ plays. It’s a sometimes cynical, sometimes encouraging idea: when faced with a world that designates us all as fugitives in our own skins, to get out of bed each day and confront the ambivalent old universe takes courage and gumption. The victory is elevated when we overcome severe circumstances and insurmountable foes. Williams smashed his characters’ backs against walls which, like a booby trap in an arcane temple, inched closer and closer to the ledge of the abyss. His characters are made to chose between leaping into oblivion or clawing up the wall. No characters are faced with more unbeatable odds than the three women who headline the one acts in our current production, Tennessee Williams: Dangerous Birds (If Agitated). When it comes to uphill climbs, these women scale Everest. 

One such indomitable character is Miss Sylvia Sails in Sunburst, a retired actress who has recently suffered a stroke, and has holed herself up in a hotel room to lick her wounds. After a couple of days, the buzzards begin to circle. A pair of devious young crooks admit themselves into her suite one night and hold her captive. Their singular focus is the Sunburst Diamond on her finger, which they unhappily learn is stuck on the digit. As they plot ways to dismember Miss Sails without stirring suspicion, she allows them to succumb to their own foolishness, and stalls them until escape is possible. In the broadest strokes, Miss Sails overcomes her plight by letting the criminals wear themselves out. Even when immobilized, helpless, and endangered, she exhibits poise, patience, and cunning to avail herself of the situation.

The diamond on the finger could easily be compared to Williams’ own fortune and fame, which became the object of concern for multitudinous hangers-on later in his life. Perhaps what he was indicating in this text is that while he may have appeared to be easy pray for sycophantic ne’er-do-wells, he wasn’t a sitting duck. 

Another powerhouse femme fatale featured in Dangerous Birds is Queen May in The Pronoun “I”. This rarely staged piece for the lyric theatre looks nothing like most viewers’ perceptions of Williams’s theatre. It takes place centuries ago and centers on an aging, despised queen who is considered to be a maniacal despot, simply for having up-ended the patriarchy. She chooses her sexuality over the demands of others, and soon enough there are pitchforks and torches at the palace gates. She boldly, even ironically stares down her adversaries with a fatalistic wit, and through cunning and ruthlessness manages to come out on top (literally and figuratively). It’s a striking reversal, but one might wonder if it be so surprising if it were a male character using similar traits to outwit his opponents.

With Queen May as a surrogate, Williams took a sledgehammer to the wall of expectations, pulverizing the idea that he needed to stay inside of a pleasant, predictable cell. He did so in this lyric piece, tinkering with both style and subject. Without spoiling the play, the chameleon act of Queen May could also be a greater metaphor for Williams’ ability to adapt to new challenges and cleverly dodge critical slings and arrows.

The most mystifying and metaphorical of the three women our night of plays chronicles is the bedraggled showgirl known only as the Gnädiges Fräulein. The symbolism in the play named after the hapless heroine has a life of its own. On its surface, the cartoonish burlesque deals with two women named Polly and Molly as they get stoned on the porch, are harassed by a menacing bird, and molest and marvel at the Fräulein, who is a tenant at Molly’s guesthouse. The comedy of this piece is entirely situational, since the characters are not much changed by its conclusion. Instead it feels like a hamster wheel of cruelty and slapstick.

The symbolism can offer insight, but isn’t a necessity. Breaking the characters down to their most basic desires, we see that Molly, the landlady who sells standing room to her rooming house and whose business focuses on quantity over quality is an obvious allusion to Broadway producers. Polly is a society reporter, so she obviously represents the press. With a little bending of the imagination, it’s not hard to see that the vicious Cocalooney Birds stand for social rabble who wish to gobble up rotten bits and pick on easy targets—a cynical view of the uninformed public, perhaps; and the character named Indian Joe is a sort of American ideal who is interested in nothing and who nobody can keep interested for long. So where does that leave our champion, the Gnädiges Fräulein?

If the showgirl is dependent upon the landlady, and the landlady is dependent upon the press, and both press and landlady have a symbiotic/parasitic relationship with the rabble. The showgirl, then, must represent the artist. Simultaneously, everyone is obsessed in one way or another with the ideal that is Indian Joe, but nobody can draw a bead on him. If this all seems complicated and heady, that’s because it is—and completely unnecessary to one’s enjoyment of the slapstick tornado that is The Gnädiges Fräulein. The poop jokes and sight gags more than prop this play up—they elevate it to high low comedy interspersed with poetic brilliance. If one wants to delve deeper, the metaphor can be further plunged, of course—the showgirl’s signature trick featured catching a fish in her jaws, a trick that the landlady demands she repeat several times a day. It speaks to Williams’ frustration with being expected to crank out brilliant reproductions of earlier plays for a general audience, or else be treated as a washed-up pariah. The woman is pecked over by the bird, ignored by the Indian, and treated as a pitiful novelty by the press. She endures repeated beatings and indignities, but even to the last moment, her fierce spirit refuses to be extinguished.

Hers is the ultimate victory of a cat on a hot tin roof. She stays on, long beyond expectation and reason, because to give up is to be defeated. The Fräulein, like the Queen and Miss Sails, obliterate the odds and press on. They defy the ambivalent universe and claim their victory against relentless adversity. While they’re not as often celebrated as Blanche, Maggie, or Amanda, these three ladies featured in Dangerous Birds are the epitome of the fighting, unflagging women Tennessee Williams idolized.

      Whether you come for low-brow fun, lofty metaphor, or a night spent watching an incredibly talented cast, join us for Dangerous Birds (If Agitated), and watch these women of Williams kick some cosmic ass.

Dangerous Birds (If Agitated) Now Playing through Nov 20

Friday - Sunday 8pm at Phillips Bar Uptown (733 Maple at Cherokee)

www.twtheatrenola.com

Photo Credits: Bunny Love as the Gnädiges Fräulein, Mary Pauley as Miss Sylvia Sails, & Abby Botnick as Queen May by Ride Hamilton / Abby Botnick & Pearson Kunz by James Kelley

World Premiere Tennessee Williams: How It's Possible

Our next production, Tennessee Williams: Weird Tales is an evening of delightfully bizarre one-act plays by America's Greatest Playwright. Two of these plays, Ivan's Widow and The Strange play have never before been staged. Very regularly we get asked by folks who haven't heard, "What's your next show?", and when we tell them that we're giving two Williams plays a world premiere, we're generally met with astonishment and the question, "How is that even possible?"

The question is asked so frequently that we thought it best to articulate it in a blog post, so the news and the details can reach even more people who are interested in Tennessee Williams' plays.

So much writing!
Tennessee Williams wrote a lot. It's probably safe to say that we have more of Williams' writing than any other significant American playwright. Between plays, short stories, poems, screenplays, and novellas, his body of work is considerable. However, if you count his collected journals, letters, notebooks, essays, and memoirs, there's even more to read about the playwright than you could have guessed (there are also paintings!). Williams wrote daily, prolifically, and compulsively. He left behind about as many clues as to his inner workings and his creative life as a person could. In an age before around-the-clock tweets and twenty-four-hour news, he was setting everything down on paper, providing future generations with a wealth of information about himself and his writing.

How do we have so many of these private clues?
So proud of her "writing son", the playwright's mother Edwina was as obsessive about collecting his work as her son was about producing it. From her collection, the writings found their ways into various archives, libraries, and collections. Draft after draft of famous Williams plays can be compared and contrasted, as he was dedicated to making every syllable count. His notes can be found  scrawled on the edges of typed sketches. They'e still pored over by dedicated scholars, dramaturgs, and lovers of Williams today.

But wait, there's more...
Williams didn't just leave behind previously produced, plays, though. There were also new ones — plays which had not been published or, in some cases, staged during his lifetime. In the three decades since his death at age 71, a number of Williams plays received their first performances, and TWTC is excited to be numbered among the companies given the privilege of staging the master's work for the first time.

En Avant!

Some of the plays premiered posthumously are from early in the author's career. The Strange Play (c. 1939) is an early, experimental work. Other plays such as Ivan's Widow (c.1982) showcase the playwright's mature, later-lifemusings. 

If you'd like to join us to toast our two never-before-seen Williams plays, Tennessee Williams: Weird Tales opens this Friday, April 1st in conjunction with the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival.

We'll see you at the theatre!

www.twtheatrenola.com

Photo Credits: (above) Alexandra Kennon in Ivan's Widow and Emily Russell in The Strange Play, photographed by James Kelley.

The "Shakespeare" Treatment

The Great and Challenging Aspects of Staging Classics

by Augustin J Correro

One of the main goals of a TWTC production is to share with the audience a performance that is unique and innovative. We purposefully aim not to restage films, since movies will always do movies better than theatre artists. We like to bend expectations and try new things. We believe that's what will help us to keep theatre relevant and living. The alternative to living theatre is artificial theatre: theatre as an artifact.

We have great reverence for artifacts, don't get me wrong. However, artifacts aren't something we're normally allowed to touch. Just the same, it's hard for artifacts to touch us from the inside of a glass case—and we're interested in theatre that touches people.

Somewhat often, audience members express a feeling of disconnection (of not being touched) when they see classics produced. Moliere falls flat for them, or Sophocles is less of a tragedy and more of a snooze. The folks that share this feeling with me express that they appreciate the plays, but that they really don't derive enjoyment from seeing them. One culprit for this kind of audience exclusion is expectation. Producers and artists alike have to grapple with the expectations of what plays might-or-should look and sound like, sometimes to the detriment of the experience. Whether it's austere Ibsen or fancy-schmancy Shaw, people have expectations about plays and playwrights, and they can be hard to shake.

Several of Tennessee Williams' plays are American classics. Naturally, they come with expectations (conventions like Southern belles wrestling with desire or families battling over inheritance). In addition to informing how the better known plays are staged, the TW classics dictate how the general public views the plays they're not as familiar with. For example, it's hard to find a review of a Tennessee Williams play that doesn't compare the play being discussed to Streetcar, The Glass Menagerie, or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. 

In addition to fulfilling expectations set down by other plays, some productions of Williams' works seem to mimic conventions from previous stagings, giving the audience some approximation of what they might have come to expect. This creates even more stagnancy in how Williams' plays are staged. 

However, even though many productions err on the familiar side, others blow the lid off of those expectations. They challenge the expectations, toss off the conventions, and create unique iterations of the plays. For the audience, it really can go either way. It can be an absolute thrill to see a complete departure or a style of Tennessee they never expected, or it can be a blazing hot mess. 

When it comes to staging plays, there are those who would say "do it like it's been done before, always", or more pragmatically "give the people what they want". These are valid notions, but to illuminate the other side of the argument, I'd like to draw a comparison between Tennessee Williams and the other greatest English-speaking playwright: William Shakespeare.

There are die-hard purists in both the Williams and the Shakespeare camps, suggesting the actor doesn't breathe or blink unless it's in the script . There are also those who would yank the literary texts out of the library and burn the books, choosing only to stage the heart and soul of the plays, with no regard for the particulars. We at TWTC prefer a more measured approach than either of these, and we're not alone.

There are lots of factors which contribute to the "Shakespeare Treatment", where we universally acknowledge that something is "great", but when we go to see it or pick it up to present it, we can't figure out why it doesn't make us feel "great". It's also hard to express why to those around us because we're afraid to sound unsophisticated when we say "Shakespeare is over my head" or "Tennessee Williams is like grandma stuff". We can feel left out when we're told that Shakespeare is universal and that Tennessee Williams is the poet of the human soul, but that production with those good actors around that lacy table just wasn't our cup of tea. I've been there. Then I saw productions that changed my mind.

Some of the most thrilling iterations of Shakespeare that I've ever seen were reimagined, updated in terms of staging, or non-traditionally cast. Some of them were painstakingly staged to resemble the original productions but focused on the audience's understanding rather than showcasing the esoteric virtuosity of the performers. Either way works, as long as it's audience-centered. By treating Shakespeare's plays as living art, companies are able to engage new audiences, captivate existing ones, and challenge artists—all while respecting the text. Rather than pumping formaldehyde into the plays to preserve them at just below room temperature, these kinds of productions keep blood flowing to the heart and brain of theatre, keeping it alive, hot, and vital.

The same can be said of Williams' plays, and it's our hope that more productions will exhibit daring, innovation, and imagination. We've seen it work (we've seen it not-so-much work, too), and TWTC is committed to sharing new, unique, and enriched stagings with the New Orleans community.

Our upcoming production of Small Craft Warnings by Tennessee Williams features a diverse cast and is set during the holidays, present day. It's performed very close to the audience in a bar (the setting put down by TW in the script), and you can drink from the very same bar as the characters. These choices are all departures from previous productions, but were made with respect for the text and the audience. See how it makes you feel. We'll see you at the theatre!

Small Craft Warnings by Tennessee Williams

December 10-20, Thursdays-Monday. 8pm Weekdays, 7pm Saturdays & Sundays. 

Performed at Mag's 940 - 940 Elysian Fields (at Elysian & North Rampart)

Tickets can be purchased at www.twtheatrenola.com or by calling 504-264-2580

Tennessee Williams: Better Late Than Never

Kingdom of Earth is considered a unique—if not risky—first production choice.  Since its premiere more than four decades ago, Kingdom has been described several ways including poorly derivative of earlier works, lesser-known, and even outright bad Williams. While the reception so far of our production has been good, I'll put that aside to pose the question: what qualifies “bad Williams”?

by Augustin J Correro

Kate Kuen as Myrtle & Sean Richmond as Chicken. Photo by: James Kelley

Logically, to decide what makes some Williams “bad”, we begin by assessing what’s considered “good Williams”. We turn to the commonly produced canon, which includes (in no particular order): The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Night of the Iguana, The Rose Tattoo, Sweet Bird of Youth, Suddenly Last Summer, Orpheus Descending, and arguably Vieux Carre and Camino Real. Much of why a small portion of Williams has been put into the “good” pile is the critical response to the plays at the time of their debuts on (or off) Broadway. Kingdom, or as it was known in its first Broadway iteration, The Seven Descents of Myrtle, was not a smash. Maybe it was the uncomely name. Maybe it was a largely homophobic critical community who wouldn’t have been pleased with anything Williams turned out. We may never know for sure. Whatever the case, Myrtle was a flop in 1968, so it must be bad (Right?).
  What made Streetcar, Menagerie, and the like good, then? Nowadays, it’s taken for granted that the plays were the typical, formulaic fare of the day when they premiered. This isn't true. These plays were cutting edge at the time. They were at the forefront of theatrical innovation, blending concepts Williams learned from film and techniques he learned at the New School under such teachers as Erwin Piscator (a mentor of Brecht in Germany), interspersed with traditional methods he’d seen in his lifetime. If they seem “safe” now, it’s because they influenced what came after. Even Arthur Miller acknowledged the role Williams played in paving the way for Death of a Salesman and his other plays. What designates the later works as “bad” is that they weren’t just on the edge—they were ahead of their time—at times even over the edge. I’d like to assert that this isn’t by its definition a bad thing.
  The grotesque, occasionally overdrawn aspects of Williams’ late plays were shocking to the audience. The elements worked against the plays’ receptions, because audiences and especially critics did not know what to do with the brave, new material. Because it did not exist in what was already designated as the “good Williams” box, a “bad Williams” designation came into play. After a certain point (a Night of the Iguana tipping point, it could be called) most of the playwright’s new material would be dumped into the “bad Williams” box. Genre confusion was coupled with the stigma attached to Williams’ very public humiliations as he struggled with countless deaths of loved ones and contemporaries, drug addiction, anxiety, alcoholism, and a society which would punish him for living outside the closet. He wrestled for about thirty years with managing the expectations placed on him by early successes, at once wanting to move on from topics and tropes he’d already explored, forging ahead toward new truths and conventions of interest to him, while at the same time needing validation from the reviewers and viewers. He had immense difficulty writing what he found fulfilling and true while grappling with the suffocating pressure of being told what he should write by merciless and obdurate critics.
    They were clamoring for Stanley. They pined for Maggie. Williams didn’t give them reproductions of these characters, so they projected their needs (and continue to) onto characters that—while they share some similarities—are vastly different. Myrtle is not Maggie or Blanche: no other character in a full-length play is a washed up showgirl and likely hooker, with a voice like Bette Midler. Stanley and Chicken both have rippling biceps and shout a little, but their histories, flaws, and actions are divided by a gulf deep with differences. Calling Kingdom a lesser Streetcar is an unfair comparison because they’re more different than they are similar. Going that one step further in comparison, some will assert that Williams wrote himself into his plays. Still, if you think Lot is definitively Tennessee Williams, reconsider: you can’t say he doesn’t have just as much in common with Norman Bates of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.  Speaking of black and white film, we mustn’t forget that much of what Tennessee Williams is in the greater social consciousness is more influenced by films based on his plays than by the plays themselves. Common practice for theatre is to prop up a facsimile of the famous film onstage and call it art. But as Williams put down in his production note to The Glass Menagerie:

Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

The real mire one falls into when taking cues off of film versions, however, is the horrific hacking away at the meat of the plays done by censors to appease Puritanical production codes. Perhaps the most rancid example is that in the film version of Menagerie, Laura gets a happy ending. The films were watered down, to say the least. So when you photocopy water, you just make a mess.
  Countless replicative stagings paraded before squirming audiences, the negative factors in Williams’ personal life which prompted critical and social scorn, and every half-baked, insensitive review: these are the lenses through which many critics still judge Williams. With other historical figures, we’re quick to jump on the bandwagon anytime fresh information is uncovered detailing the intricacies of their lives. Even with other playwrights, who would experiment endlessly received some grace from the critics for their audacity. On this topic, Marcel Meyer of Abrahamse/Meyer Productions, an award-winning South African theatre company had this to say:

No one speaks of “good Ibsen” and “bad Ibsen”--stylistically Peer Gynt’s  a million miles away from Hedda Gabler and no one chastises Ibsen for being a “bad” playwright for writing in a different style – same with Shakespeare – you couldn’t find plays more different than Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Twelfth Night or A  Winter’s Tale and no one ever speaks of “good Shakespeare” and “bad Shakespeare”…Tennessee Williams IS and always WAS a great playwright. Period. He wasn’t good up to a point and then suddenly became a bad playwright. He IS and WILL always be one of the world’s greatest playwrights. …But on the other hand Eugene O’Neill is praised and lauded for all is experiments in drama! Strange Interlude is nothing like Desire Under the Elms which is a million miles away from the Hairy Ape which is nothing like The Iceman Commeth – but yet critics in the USA are willing to praise each of these plays on THEIR OWN TERMS and are willing to see what O’Neill was trying to do… 

    Now is as good a time as ever to say that we at TWTC are not a cult. We don’t think that Tennessee could do no wrong. We don’t think that he, as a person or playwright, was infallible. As an individual he was just as flawed as any of us. Regarding Williams as a writer, there is some work that isn’t “production-ready”. Most of what has been published has proven to be production ready. We encourage our audiences and colleagues to take a more thorough look at his work in content and context.For some reason, more than three decades after his death, Tennessee Williams is still in the bog of bunk information. Scholars like Thomas Keith, David Kaplan, Karen Kohlhaas, Annette Saddik, and many others are tireless in their efforts to shed light on the late-life smear campaign led against Williams by the unkind media. John Lahr in his recent biography Tennessee Williams: A Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh spends dozens of pages on the topic. Still, in the eyes of many critics and reviewers, Tennessee Williams was a washed-up drunk who didn’t turn out a good piece of theatre after 1962. Production after production is proving this idea wrong. Audiences are today more willing to go on these wild adventures with Williams once they’re in their seats. It’s up to theatre producers and lovers of Williams to build the framework for these productions.
    Perhaps the sentiment most frequently echoed in critical reception of this play is encapsulated in this 1968 review: “There is no rational explanation of The Seven Descents of Myrtle except that Tennessee Williams is burlesquing himself, if that is rational. Williams’ exercises in southern degradation have sometimes illuminated the human condition, but this one is narrow, obsessively petty, and essentially ludicrous.” (Edwin Newman, NBC News). Of this, David Kaplan, Curator of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival wrote in Tenn Years, his new book of essays: “What was called burlesque—Williams’ reconfiguration of his earlier themes under the light of his later experience—is now recognized as the widening of his vision as a creative artist.”
  Regarding its outlandishness when compared to Cat or Menagerie, Kingdom is not so far-out as some of Williams’ writing from the 1970s, so it’s just a taste of what he was capable of. Our aim as a company is to begin to build a Williams vocabulary with our community so that we can begin to break down the wall that separates “good Williams”, or trusted canonical Williams, from “bad Williams”, which we feel is just more uncharted Williams.
    We hope our daring, supportive New Orleans audience will be brave with us as we go on these frontier adventures. As Lord Byron says in Camino Real before setting off into the great unknown: “Make voyages!—Attempt them!—There’s nothing else.”