EgoPo's "Something Cloudy, Something Clear'

Tennessee Williams, in steep decline

ROBERT ZALLER

Tennessee Williams, in a poem to a long-ago lover, asked to be remembered among his partners as “the one who smiled least.” It’s a better line than any in Bird’s last, valedictory play, Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981), which portrays the same gent as part of a maudlin triangle in which love is indeed much talked about but very little shown, and which even the usually resourceful EgoPo company cannot rescue.

The play is set in Provincetown in the summer of 1940. Twenty-nine-year-old August (Kelly Groves), an aspiring playwright living in a beach house and an obvious stand-in for Tennessee himself, finds himself drawn to Kip (Sean Lally), an unemployed Canadian dancer who is given moodily winsome poses downstage as the action v-e-r-y slowly develops. Shy August tries to meet Kip through his “sister” Clare (Alice Whitley), who is happy enough to pimp Kip since, as she explains to August, they are both the sort of people who have to live off others— a rather less poetic version of Blanche DuBois’ reliance on the kindness of strangers in A Streetcar Named Desire.

Death as a bathetic device

August soon finds himself in love, and, despite what we’re supposed to take for a native shrewdness, he proposes to set up a ménage à trois in New York to shelter his two waifs. Kip nonetheless plays hard to get, and profoundly violated when he is finally gotten. His behavior makes no particular sense— either he is or he isn’t hustling— until we discover that both he and Clare suffer from terminal illnesses. This is a move that works very well in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, where impending death is integral to the plot, but here it’s merely bathetic.

As for plot resolution, Williams jumps his own ship here by the framing device of an older August looking back at his youthful self. Big Daddy will really die, but Kip and Clare, whatever their fates, live on sentimentally in memory.

Diversions from inadequacy

Various other characters wander in and out of the proceedings— a pair of shady producers who want August to rewrite his new play; a gangsterish night club owner; a rough trade lover who wears a winter overcoat despite the season; August’s own sister; and the real-life character of Tallulah Bankhead, who is given an over-the-top rendition by Megan Hoke. They’re mostly designed to fill out August’s situation and give body to his character, but they function chiefly as a distraction from the main plot, or a diversion from its inadequacy.

The two great virtues of Tennessee Williams’s theater were the poetry of his dramatic speech, and his brutal emotional honesty. Both, sad to say, are almost wholly absent in Something Cloudy, Something Clear. August is narcissistically self-involved; Kip is strangely neutered; Clare is skanky. These characters will never strike a spark. They are, in Williams’s universal division of humankind, the sensitive souls who are invariably in conflict with, and often at the mercy of, ruder if more vital types. But this conflict, too, is largely absent in the play, and the Kowalski contingent struts its vulgar stuff without much affecting the major players.

A playwright who outlived his art

Perhaps most depressing is the flatness, not to say banality, of Williams’s language. There are occasional flashes of wit and bite, but they fail to raise the general tone, and some of the diction makes one wince for a great poet. Some of the later Tennessee Williams, though not up to his earlier work, is still intermittently eloquent and theatrically viable; but in Something Cloudy, Something Clear, he has outlived his art. I can’t say EgoPo has made the best case for the play, but even a better one would not convince.

We’ll always have Stanley and Blanche, though. That was Bird.



To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.