In La Femme Theatre Productions’ new revival of a certain Tennessee Williams play, a fading Southern belle—one whose name you probably won’t recognize—first appears huffing and wiggling through a set of “setting-up exercises.” It’s late-Depression Era St. Louis, and Dorothea, described in Williams’ stage directions as “marginally youthful but attractive,” is waiting for a phone call—one that we realize, early on, won’t be coming any time soon.
The phone does ring, but remains unanswered by Bodey, the less well-preserved and hard-of-hearing spinster with whom Dorothea is rooming, ostensibly for a short while. But neither Dorothea nor Bodey is likely going anywhere, any more than Vladimir and Estragon were. Williams introduced his characters, and the two other single women of a certain age we meet in Creve Coeur, decades after Beckett’s hobos made their entrance. Developed in different incarnations before it was produced in New York in 1979, Williams’ play had a short run and has since faded into near-obscurity.
Creve Coeur did escape the scorn that met some of Williams’ other later works, leaving it ripe for a safe, sensitive revival, which is what director Austin Pendleton and his accomplished cast deliver here. Jean Lichty, who is La Femme’s executive director and plays Dorothea, writes in a program note that Williams attended almost every performance of the play’s original New York run, and “would sit in house seats, shouting out encouragement and appreciation along with his signature cackle.”
There’s little to cackle at in this production, though the players—notably Kristine Nielsen, an inspired choice for Bodey—gently stoke the piquant comedy Williams could always inject into the bleakest of circumstances. Nielsen summons all her distinctive drollness—notably that marvelous, purring voice, capable of sweetening the naughtiest insinuations—while also mining the nurturing, maternal quality that makes this seasoned maid, who yearns to set Dorothea up with her brother, the most poignant of Creve Coeur’s characters.
It’s easy to appreciate Bodey’s sympathy for the more glamorous Dorothea, a high school teacher. Lichty makes the latter patently high-strung and brittle, pacing Harry Feiner’s set, a study in florid squalor, in outfits (designed for the period, by Beth Goldenberg) that flatter her girlish figure while reminding us Dorothea left girlhood behind some time ago. Pendleton lets the actress buzz and flutter across the stage without disrupting the languorous feel of the staging, which the character eventually, inevitably settles into; more than some of Williams’ famous female characters who cling to youth—notably that onetime schoolteacher Blanche DuBois—Dorothea finally emerges as pragmatic, and Lichty gives her some steel.
There’s another professional woman in Creve Coeur, Helena, a colleague of Dorothea who arrives at the apartment with airs to rival any caricature of a Southern gentlewoman. In truth, Helena is as lonely a soul as any of the others, and Annette O’Toole captures her despair and her haughtiness while clashing wittily with Nielsen’s Bodey. O’Toole also nicely conveys her character’s pained discretion as Helena tries to hint at information, concerning the man Dorothea is waiting to hear from, that her friend clearly won’t want to hear.
No male characters appear in Creve Coeur, and the final image is of the fourth woman, Bodey’s upstairs neighbor, Miss Gluck, played by a hilarious, haunting Polly McKie. Palpably older and not in the best of health, as Williams suggests with a wicked bit of scatological humor, Miss Gluck embodies the fear underlying the other women’s romantic notions and machinations. One leaves this production wishing them all a happier future, but by no means ready to bet on one.
A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur opened September 23, 2018, at St. Clements and runs through October 21. Tickets and information: lafemmetheatreproductions.org
