EgoPo's "Something Cloudy' (2nd review)

Tennessee Williams look back,
through the lens of a dream

STEVE COHEN

This final work of Tennessee Williams's career is a memory play, but different from Vieux Carré and The Glass Menagerie. Here Williams is not a narrator outside the action looking back at an earlier time but, rather, the playwright playing the part of a playwright and existing in two time frames simultaneously.

Wait a minute, you might say; in Vieux Carré he also was reminiscing about himself. But that was Tom Williams as a generic, formative writer, and that play was more about a young man being introduced to the people and experiences of New Orleans. Something Cloudy, Something Clear is set later and is concerned with a man already in the theater profession whose first hit, The Glass Menagerie, is about to be produced on Broadway.

The plot is specifically about the negotiations that need to be done to get his play produced. Parallel to this is a story about the negotiations between Williams (here called August) and a previously straight man with whom he shares an instant mutual attraction. Kip is a young dancer from Canada, an illegal alien who needs a harbor. He’s also ill and can’t afford health care.

Look how prescient Williams was. Illegal immigration and the high costs of heath care– in a drama set 68 years ago, and written 27 years ago.

So Kip needs to be kept, while August/Williams needs a lover. As he says several times, a negotiation of terms is necessary. Here the two biggest problems of this play arise. First, the script tells us more than once that negotiations are going on. That’s redundant. Second, for all that Williams tells us about himself, he doesn’t explain why he feels such a strong urge for nightly sexual release. (Twice he pays for unpleasant sex with a merchant seaman.)

Enter Tallulah

The interjections of some of the past characters into his present world are a bit awkward. So is the arrival of Tallulah Bankhead, who will play the lead in August’s new play (although actually she didn’t. More about this in a moment). Tallulah’s outrageous behavior, as spectacularly evoked by Megan Hoke, serves as comedy relief. But her presence isn’t fully integrated into the rest of the play.

Clearly– pun intended– this is an imperfect play. It sometimes loses focus. But it is by no means the mess that was described by critics when it premiered in an off-off Broadway hotel room in 1981, two years before Williams’s death, and by Toby Zinman in the Inquirer now.

Something Cloudy, Something Clear is a dream-like memory play that was experimental for its time. Williams borrowed some ideas from earlier work like August Strindberg’s A Dream Play. In fact, his naming of his alter ego "August" may be an acknowledgment of that debt. And his deconstruction of the story foretells the deconstruction movement in contemporary theater.

Autobiographical characters, renamed

Some of the characters are autobiographical but re-named, such as Williams himself and the overbearing husband-and-wife producers, based on Lawrence and Armina Langner. (You could read the cannibalism in Suddenly Last Summer as a description of such producers.) Others are specifically named after real figures from Williams’s life: his one-summer lover Kip; his girlfriend from adolescence, Hazel; another lover, Frank Merlo; and of course Tallulah Bankhead. That flamboyant actress wasn’t connected with Williams’s first play, but she did appear later in his life in a 1956 revival of his Streetcar Named Desire and in The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore in 1963. Williams’s script is extremely critical of her lifestyle, apparently based on experiences that he doesn’t recount here.

My hunch is that Williams detested Bankhead while also adoring her because he saw similarities to himself. Tallulah, like Williams, had a ravenous appetite for alcohol and sex. Probably Williams intended his Tallulah as an example of someone who negotiated and sold out in exchange for the attention of enablers and sycophants.

Talking to the dead

Eerie moments occur when August talks to characters about how they died— not how they will die but how they expired, past tense. The "double exposure," as the script calls it, of past and present is tantalizing. The parallels of negotiations in one’s artistic and personal lives are intriguing. The staging is atmospheric: His characters seek rescue on a metaphorical beach that also was used by Williams in Suddenly Last Summer, Night of the Iguana and Small Craft Warnings.

Speaking of metaphors, Williams was obsessed with the fact that his left eye developed a cataract early in his life and therefore was cloudy. The left eye also, apparently, turned outward. The term used in those days was "wall-eyed." Williams uses those words self-consciously and repeatedly. His discomfort with his appearance is turned here into an examination of what’s clear in life versus what is not, and what becomes clear only with the passage of time.

Whether or not these events actually took place as described is immaterial. At the very end, August tells Clare she doesn’t exist, and she replies, "Neither do you." He responds: "At this moment I do, in order to remember."

No Southern accent needed

This production is notable for the purposeful physical interaction of the characters by the EgoPo company and by the chemistry between Kelly Groves and Sean Lally as August and Kip. The handsome Groves, as directed by Brenna Geffers, has the mannerisms and inflections of Tennessee Williams but not his Southern accent. This works; it makes his words connect clearly with Northern audiences. Groves as August makes an extremely appealing figure. August calls Kip "beautiful," but to me, Lally is better described as having a charismatic, rugged face with a strong jaw line. In any case, the match of the two men is exciting. Alice Whitely is appealing as the young woman who is Kip’s friend.

Something Cloudy, Something Clear benefits from the use of recordings that August plays on his Victrola. One is Pavanne for a Dead Princess, whose subtext is unmistakable when you realize that some of the characters are dead. That instrumental composition of Ravel was turned into a popular song, The Lamp is Low, which became one of the big hits of 1940, the very year in which most of this play is set.

Some of the other neglected plays of Williams might be failures. We will be able to see for ourselves when other theater companies continue the Tennessee Williams Festival with staged readings of Pink Bedroom, 27 Wagons, Not About Nightingales and Stairs to the Roof between April 7 and June 20. But this particular play is no failure.



To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.