Ever since I performed in my high school production of Camino Real (yes, you read that correctly) I’ve been fascinated by the so-called lesser Tennessee Williams plays. And if you ask most critics and academics, that means virtually everything after 1961’s The Night of the Iguana, plus anything in the ’40s and ’50s that wasn’t The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Streetcar Named Desire—you get the picture.
But there are treasures to be found in what so many Williams scholars dismiss as Southern-fried trash. Witness the Drama Dept.’s 1996 resuscitation of Kingdom of Earth (which had spectacularly flopped on Broadway in 1968 as The Seven Descents of Myrtle), starring Peter Sarsgaard as a TB-ridden mama’s boy and Cynthia Nixon as his unsuspecting showgirl wife. Or the Wooster Group’s 2011 acid-trippy, porn-filled, visually hedonistic Vieux Carré. And I still get chills over the claustrophobic two-hander Green Eyes, performed in 2011 in a room at the Hudson Hotel for a dozen or so audience members.
Another of those oft-dismissed titles that’s ripe for reinvention: A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, a late ’70s oddity set in a stifling St. Louis apartment, currently receiving a handsome if uneven revival off-Broadway at the Theatre of St. Clement’s.
The chief pleasures of this production are the always terrific Kristine Nielsen and Annette O’Toole, who should perform together more often (let’s make that happen, shall we?): Nielsen stars as the well-meaning and hard-of-hearing Bodey, who’s prepping for a picnic at Creve Coeur; she’s hoping to fix up her pretty younger roommate, Dotty (Jean Lichty), with her ample twin brother, Buddy. O’Toole plays the highfalutin Helena, who teaches high school with Dorothea—she never calls her Dotty like Bodey does—and arrives unannounced at the ladies’ cramped apartment. Bodey has business to attend to; there are eggs to be deviled and drumsticks to be fried. But Helena has business of her own: extracting Dorothea from her thrift-shop surroundings—“The most remarkable room that I’ve ever stepped into! Especially the combination of colors. Such a vivid contrast!” Helena crows—so they can move into a “lovely” duplex on the much-more-stylish Westmoreland Place.
Dotty, meanwhile, is waiting for a gentleman caller—literally. She’s expecting a phone call from her beloved Ralph, after they shared a very special evening in a sedan with reclining seats. “My life must include romance!” cries Dotty. Later, she’ll wash down a few sedatives with a gulp of sherry and go on a rant about how she threw away her youth on Hathaway James, a “musical prodigy” with a “chronic case of premature ejaculation.” It’s amazing what Tennessee Williams could get away with when he didn’t have to worry about the censors!
Creve Coeur is actually a very funny play: There’s a scene where the upstairs neighbor, Miss Gluck (Polly McKie) gets “the runs” and floods the toilet. Bodey has an extended monologue about buying chicken, which Nielsen, naturally, spins into comic gold: “Mr. Butts always lets me feel his meat,” she says of the Piggly-Wiggly butcher. “It’s the German in me. I got to feel the meat to know it’s good.” But there’s an undeniable undercurrent of tragedy. Miss Gluck is almost catatonically depressed thanks to the recent death of her mother. Dorothea is clearly a descendant of Blanche DuBois. Bodey refuses to accept wearing a hearing aid. (Sound designer Ryan Rumery reproduces that high-pitched feedback squeal brilliantly.) And Helena’s lacquered exterior can’t conceal her bitter, deep-seated loneliness: “There’s nothing lonelier than a woman dining alone.… I cannot bear the humiliation of occupying a restaurant table for one.”
It’s a delicate tonal balance, and this production—directed by Austin Pendleton, who has acted in and helmed a variety of Williams plays, including the bizarre Small Craft Warnings (a beautician, a doctor, and a gay screenwriter walk into a bar…)— almost strikes it. The main problem is Lichty. She has the precise look—beautiful, thin, wispy, high-strung—that her character requires, but her speech is strained, almost manic, and, unfortunately, barely audible. Because despite her brief barbiturate-induced blackout, Dorothea is a woman who has a lot to say.
A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur opened Sept. 23, 2018, and runs through Oct. 21 at the Theatre at St. Clement’s. Tickets and information: lafemmetheatreproductions.org
