EgoPo's 'Vieux Carré'

A transfusion for Tennessee Williams

STEVE COHEN

The works of Tennessee Williams, his words dripping with desperation and phrases glistening with sweat, have been absent of late in theaters. And his Vieux Carré never received many performances even when Williams was popular. How audacious, then, for EgoPo to schedule a Williams Festival and to open it with this 1977 play.

On the other hand, how natural a choice it is for EgoPo, which developed in New Orleans and relocated in Philadelphia after Hurricane Katrina destroyed its home, sets and costumes. Williams wrote about New Orleans and this play is set in, and named for, a New Orleans neighborhood.

Lane Savadove lived and worked in New Orleans for four years and directed Williams’s plays there. So it’s a logical pairing but not a slam dunk, because the genre is difficult and this play particularly so. Therefore I’m pleased to see how well Savadove and his company have succeeded.

Under his direction, Vieux Carré comes across as a gritty sequel to The Glass Menagerie, displaying the playwright’s maturation after he left his mother and sister in St. Louis. Moving into a decaying rooming house in the Vieux Carré district, the young Tennessee– here called The Writer– lives among drug addicts, thieves, alcoholics, tuberculars and gay people as he explores his own sexuality and begins to write on an Underwood portable typewriter.

Young writer, old playwright

The play makes a nice distinction between the Writer as a young man and as a mature man returning to reminisce and narrate. The young Writer speaks unaffectedly, with an accent typical of his St. Louis upbringing, while the older man speaks with the acquired panache of a Southern gentleman. Williams lived the first seven years of his life in Mississippi and he had family in Tennessee, so perhaps he came by a Southern drawl naturally. But the evidence suggests that he put on his exaggerated, effete New Orleans accent as an affectation.

The play introduces us to an eccentric bitch of a landlady and her tenants, who include a flamboyantly gay artist, a society girl on the run, an abusive lover who has moved in with her, and two lady roommates who pick the trash to avoid starving to death. Through the combination of Williams’s skill as a storyteller, Savadove’s direction and fine acting, we get to care about these uniformly lonely residents. "There's so much loneliness in this house you can hear it," says the Writer as the stage band plays Duke Ellington’s "Solitude."

Echoes of Kushner’s Angels

Each of the characters turns out to possess interesting dimensions, revealed in degrees as the evening progresses. Particularly haunting is the artist who is ill with tuberculosis and denies his sickness, much the way Roy Cohn does in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. This man claims to have a cold, then says he was treated in the hospital for "asthma." In one of the play’s most gripping moments, the Writer tells the dying artist to stop pretending and admit what he has. Williams seems to be telling himself to come out and be what he is. Savadove stages this most intimate moment by having the two actors pick up microphones and whisper their words through an echoing amplification system.

What separates this play from unappealing, trailer-trash dramas is Williams’s poetic imagery and abundant heart— which is ironic when you consider the indictment the playwright delivers against himself. In his script, the artist tells the Writer: "I have a cold. You have a cold in your heart."

Savadove takes the three-story dwelling and stages it horizontally, on one level of a deep stage, and this arrangement works well. In his conception some of the action thrusts forward while other action recedes to the rear. Savadove’s approach also stresses physicality and intense emotion. That’s what makes this 30-year-old play jump out at us.

Too emotional for today?

Excellent performances are turned in by Doug Greene as the Writer, Leah Walton as the landlady, DaVine Randolph as the housekeeper, Andrew Borthwick-Leslie as the artist, Megan Hoke as the society gal and Nathan Edmonson as her lover, plus Sarah Schol, Kristen Schier, Eric Snell and Robert DaPonte.

Why did Williams’s popularity wane? I suspect partly because his later plays seemed repetitious and because audiences turned away from such overt emotionalism. Also, in part, because Williams’s plays are long while today’s audiences are heading in an opposite direction: towards 90-minute one-acts. But Angels in America utilized many of Tennessee’s tricks and succeeded. It’s time for the original to return to public view.