From the very beginning of the American Theater Company’s production of Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending, you get the sense that nothing but despair will cross this stage. There is a desperation in the body of Lady Torrence, the aging shopkeeper whose curmudgeonly husband is on his death bed, that one can immediately detect will not sustain itself. The title comes from the Greek myth of the musician Orpheus’s descent into the underworld, and it is not the only supernatural theme Williams called upon in this play. Orpheus Descending is full of black magic at its blackest, with voodoo curses, witchcraft and the darkest of Christian themes. Yet, out of all the haze comes one of Williams’ most compelling theatrical experience; and the American Theater Company has shown remarkable courage in putting an exceptionally despairing view of the worst elements of the world.
It’s easy to see how the themes of a rumbled up, messy, confounding view of a universe rubbed many critics the wrong way in 1957, hence the lesser known legacy of the play. This is a world where no one has any sense of hope unless it’s at the most useless time possible, where past demons continue to torture and drag down an individual years after they first show their ugly head. It’s a world of gossip, violence and vice, and it’s perhaps the darkest Tennessee Williams, a playwright known for shocking themes, ever created. Set in the Mississippi outskirts of New Orleans in 1948, Williams begins with the story of the gruesome death of Lady Torrence’s father, and how that death doomed her marriage, as well as her life, beyond all repair. When Val, a young, handsome former blues musician enters the scene and looks for a job, she views him as her savior, and secrets clamors for him to be “store clerk by day, stud at night.” Even through the development to this fantasy’s fruition, we see both Val and Lady Torrence stumble into a world beyond redemption, where fragile lives become even more fragile, until the ending, where the characters shatter. While Williams was never one for a happy ending, in no other play did the tragedy run this deep, leaving a more aghast feeling to come out of the play with.
For a play with such fractured, jarred emotions, it takes an exceptional production, and especially an exceptional cast, to fully impress the despondency on the audience. Damon Kiely’s production does just that. He’s helped out by an absoluting spellbinding display of acting intuition by his two leads. As Lady Torance, ATC veteran Carmen Roman seems to grasp just how desperately her character is clinging to a hope to do over her life, and somehow find a way out of the bottomless pit she’s fallen into. Her seduction of Val is at once pathetic, incensed, and sympathetic. Val, as portrayed with remarkable realism by Steve Key, has a surprisingly earnest nature, considering what can be intuited from his past, and we get the sense his boyish adventurousness in his speech and his actions that we can tell can get him into more trouble than he deserves. Yet, there’s also a dark element to Val’s character that’s barely visible, but impossible to ignore. You can tell that the director and actors worked hard on the movements on stage, as the movements, while entirely natural, give off a consistently disorderly, grating feel to what’s on stage. The production staff also did its part; Keith Pitts set gives an excellent view of a store long overdue for massive reorganization, which simultaneously is a source for comfort and claustrophobia for the characters on stage. Furthermore Charlie Cooper offers one of the best examples of how lighting can make a play, as his lights paint the set a faint red-orange tint, giving of a sense that while we may be on earth, we are also in the land of the damned.
Tennessee Williams worked on Orpheus Descending for nearly twenty years, which is why it’s no surprise that Orpheus Descending has been called the most “Williams” of Williams’ plays. While Lady Torrance does have elements of Blanche DuBois, and Val certainly has the earnest but uncertain nature of Tom Wingfield, these are characters stripped down to their bare nature, victims of no injustice except their existence. Val says it best when he says “there are two kinds of people in this world, those that are bought and the buyers.” In this world, no one exists without a price on his body and his soul, and the interactions that entail from people trying to exist on their own create a sense of disillusionment so prevalent in society. But this is not your existentialist disillusionment; this is disillusionment in the Macbethian sense, a disillusionment where from dust we rise, and to dust we shall return. It’s this take on bare nature of existence that, although it makes ATC’s production of Orpheus Descending one of the darkest nights in theater, also one of the most rewarding.
