"The Gnädiges Fräulein' by Tennessee Williams

In a reductio ad absurdum, you treat your opponent's premises seriously, while pointing out that his conclusions necessarily lead to an absurd, illogical or impossible situation. Suppose, for example, you're arguing with someone who believes that we should terminate genetically imperfect babies. The reductio would show that since no fetus possesses a perfect genetic code, it's OK to abort all babies, a line of argument that no one would endorse.

In literature and film, reductios often appear in satire or parody, as in Joseph Heller's Catch-22 or Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. In both cases, the author takes the bureaucracy's views at face value and then reduces them to the absurd situations they entail.

Tennessee Williams employs a similar approach in The Gnädiges Fräulein, an absurd exaggeration of island life in "the southernmost point of Terra Firma." Here, the local gossip columnist Polly (Kelly Vrooman) pens the "southernmost write-up of the southernmost gangbang" in between lectures to the Audubon Society on the cocaloony bird, a creature that swoops down on the set with a Hitchcockian terror of cawing crows and the scream of a single-engine airplane.

Old vaudeville stunt

Today Polly can be found digging up dirt at "the big dormitory" boarding house under "the rooftop of God," a place where "the dark angel checks the residents' dog tags" at night. The residents include a Permanent Transient named Molly (Leah Walton), a perfume-spraying, blonde-pigtailed male-Pocahontas named Indian Joe, and the titular Gnädiges Fräulein (Jane Moore), a washed-up vaudeville performer who formerly entertained the crowned heads of Europe by catching fish in her mouth.

The Fräulein now pays the rent by outcompeting cocaloony birds for throwaway fish at the docks. At the start of the play, the birds (represented by Lee Pucklis, in a Sesame-Street nightmare of a costume) have already poked out one of her eyes. Undaunted, the Fraulein ventures out again under Indian Joe's protection.

Preening gentility

"Absurd" barely begins to describe the surreal sense this production evokes. Throughout, Molly and Polly spout outlandish dialogue with mannered preening that overdrafts the bankrupt account of Southern gentility. While straddling orgasmic rocking chairs "in tune with the absolute infinite," the pair listen to the Fraulein express the inexpressible in the "the best stage soliloquy since Hamlet." Later, they tune in to see Indian Joe battle the giant bird with a hatchet.

The three actresses deliver this drivel with unabashed shamelessness. Walton's Molly staggers about with a crimped posture and utters every syllable with an exquisitely slutty growl, Vrooman caps her big-grinned game-show hostess preening with the explosive rendering of a single word ("moo"), and Moore lines up like a horse at the starting gate in her ridiculous eagerness to run after the fish. I only wish these depraved caricatures really did exist, if only to continue laughing at them.

Under Tina Brock's equally indulgent direction, one preposterous situation tumbles downhill into the next, and why not? To put the characters' actions in the context of a plot would give too much credence to their lives (not to mention ruin the spoof). The overall effect creates a world so bizarre that if the show lasted more than 65 minutes, I would've needed a road map to return to reality.

The boundaries of realism

What does it mean? I can't tell you— as I could, say, for Heller or Kubrick. The script teems with potential autobiographical references (Williams lived in Key West and was blind in one eye when he wrote it), and some critics have perceived analogies to the commercial production of art.

But who cares? The Gnädiges Fräulein stands at the boundaries of the same psychological realism that Williams's early plays (like The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire) helped to cement as central to American theater. Once in a while, we need a play like Gnädiges to remind us of that even psychological realism needs safe borders.