Tynan's Anger

There are very few things that get my juices flowing more than mainstream humor outlets making jokes about theater (one of them being jokes about hockey, as well as combining the two with Tracy Letts). So when The Onion makes a joke about theater, in the words of a threadless shirt, "I'm totally blogging that."

I seriously want to know where they got the idea for an advice column with the stage directions from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. More precisely, I want to know why I didn't get the idea first.

Enjoy, folks,

Labels: cat on a hot tin roof, tennessee williams, the onion, theater humor

"Orpheus Descending scours depths of human misery"
Published October 18, 2005 in The Chicago Maroon

From the very beginning of the American Theater Company (ATC)’s production of Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending, you get the sense that nothing but despair will cross this stage. There is desperation in the body of Lady Torrence, the aging shopkeeper whose curmudgeonly husband is on his deathbed. The title of the play comes from the Greek myth about the musician Orpheus’s descent into the underworld and it is not the only supernatural theme Williams calls 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 the haze comes one of Williams’s most rewarding theatrical experiences, and the American Theater Company has shown remarkable courage in putting on an exceptionally despairing view of the worst the world has to offer.

Not surprisingly, this messy, confounding view of the universe rubbed many critics the wrong way in 1957, causing the play to more or less fall off the public’s radar. 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 a person years after they first rear their ugly heads. It’s a world of gossip, violence and vice, perhaps the darkest one Tennessee Williams—a playwright known for shocking themes—ever created. Set in the Mississippi outskirts of New Orleans in 1948, Orpheus begins with the gruesome death of Lady Torrence’s father and details its devastating effects on her life and marriage. When Val, a young, handsome former blues musician enters the scene and looks for a job, she views him as her savior and secretly clamors for him to be “store clerk by day, stud at night.” As this fantasy comes to fruition, we see both Val and Lady Torrence stumble into a world beyond redemption, where fragile lives become even more fragile, until the ending, when the characters shatter. While Williams was never one for happy endings, in no other play does the tragedy run this deep, leaving the audience aghast.

It takes an exceptional production—and an especially exceptional cast—to fully impart the play’s despondency and fractured, jarred emotions. Damon Kiely’s production does just that. He’s helped by an absolutely spellbinding display of acting intuition by his two leads. As Lady Torrence, ATC veteran Carmen Roman seems to grasp just how desperately her character is clinging to a hope of finding a way out of the bottomless pit she’s fallen into. Her seduction of Val is at once pathetic and sympathetic. Val, portrayed with remarkable realism by Steve Key, has a surprisingly earnest nature, considering what can be intuited about his past, and we get the sense that the boyish adventurousness in his speech and actions gets 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 onstage, because while they are entirely natural, they also lend a disorderly, grating feel to the events in the play. The production staff also did its part: Keith Pitts’s set gives an excellent view of a store long overdue for massive reorganization, which is simultaneously a source of comfort and claustrophobia for the characters onstage. Furthermore, Charlie Cooper offers one of the best examples of how lighting can make a play, as his work paints the set with a faint red-orange tint, giving off 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 20 years, so it’s no surprise that it has been called the most “Williams” of his 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 own existence. Val says it best: “There are two kinds of people in this world, those that are bought and the buyers.” In their world, no one exists without a price on his body and his soul, and the interactions that occur from people trying to exist on their own create a prevalent sense of disillusionment. But this is not your typical existentialist distress; this is disillusionment in the Macbethian sense, one where from dust we rise, and to dust we shall return. It’s this take on the bare nature of existence that makes ATC’s production of Orpheus Descending one of the darkest nights in theater, and also one of the most rewarding.

Labels: 2005-2006, american theater company, maroon articles, orpheus descending, tennessee williams