It’s fortuitous that with Hadestown a long-running hit, we now have another enticing treatment of the myth on hand: a revival of Tennessee Williams’ 1957 Orpheus Descending. The playwright offers an Orpheus-Eurydice spin where guitar-playing Valentine Xavier (Pico Alexander), whose name virtually sings out “Savior,” arrives in a desolate Southern town to rescue married Lady Torrance (Maggie Siff) from the childless and loveless hell in which she’s languishing.
During the three acts (presented in two acts), the drifting and occasionally grifting Val declares he’s determined to shed the corruption he’s made his own personal inferno. He’s prepared to shed his compromised skin, which is symbolized by the snakeskin jacket followers know him to affect. He’ll wear a commonplace blue suit while working at the dry goods store Lady manages for her tyrannical dying husband Jabe Torrance (Michael Cullen). No one should be surprised that Orpheus Descending, like all Williams plays, is heavy with symbols.
Val’s presence has the ladies hanging out at the business (but never to shop) behaving as if he’s a cat among pigeons, although this nattering group has him representing something more like a cat among cuckoos. The cuckoo-ist is Carole Cutrere (Julia McDermott), a far-gone member of a local rich family. She continually has her eyes and grabby hands on the unresponding dreamboat.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Initially, Lady, habitually dressed in black, pretends resistance but is only fooling herself. She’s not fooling Val, who, taking his time, does become emotionally and physically attached to her. Also not fooled is murderous Jabe, who immediately suspects Val, as many husbands good or bad might suspect their younger wife possibly cougaring with an even younger handsome man. Sheriff Talbott (Brian Keane) is on the scent, too, as wife Vee (Ana Reeder), a painter and self-proclaimed visionary, regularly cozies up to the besieged Val.
How old are the sayings “Love makes the world go around” and its companion “Love conquers all”? Love doesn’t have these unimpeachable qualities in Tennessee Williams’ world, where from play to play it’s hate that prevails. Hate triumphs smirkingly in Lady’s and Jabe’s small town where vicious dogs are heard yapping after suspicious characters and always trap their man.
Lady is on the verge of love conquering all — even a barren womb — as she’s about to open a festive confectionery in memory of her murdered vineyard father, whom Jabe despised for selling wine to Blacks (not that he employs that safe word). That’s when things don’t go as Lady planned but rather as planned by Jabe and the Sheriff.
Orpheus Descending is worth attending, especially for theatergoers devoted to the America’s most poetic 20th-century playwright. But it’s not an ultimately successful play. There are reasons that wouldn’t ordinarily be available because audiences don’t make a habit of attending a play after having boned up on the playwright’s frame of mind while writing the play. Anyone, however, who’s read John Lahr’s definitive biography Tennessee Williams, subtitled “Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh,” has learned that Williams was in emotional turmoil while getting this one down on paper.
That goes some way towards explaining the turmoil affecting a drama not the equal of brilliantly contained Williams entities like The Glass Menagerie or A Streetcar Named Desire or Summer and Smoke or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, all written under more conducive, maybe less psychologically unsettling times.
Williams being at sixes and sevens explains that in the process of composing he seems unusually occupied rooting through his other works or anticipating impending works on his persisting themes. Playwrights commonly return to the same themes. But with Orpheus Descending there’s the uncomfortable sense that Williams is reduced to mining the romantic tensions in The Rose Tattoo (1951) or gearing up for the final violence involving Chance Wayne in Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). It’s as if Williams is including a little bit of this and a little bit of that and a little bit of frequently seeing himself in both his injured central men and women.
On the other hand, Williams is at moments able to tap into his myriad brilliant instincts. There are Val-Lady and Val-Carol scenes, and scenes featuring Jabe and the Sheriff that for some minutes strike deeply, that rise to the level of his best and most thrilling writing.
And there is Williams’ irrepressible poetic thinking. One of the most memorable poetic speeches in all his writing floats up when Val tells Lady about a bird that has no legs and therefore must always remain airborne. Symbolically describing his own wish for himself, he says, “You can’t tell those birds from the sky and that’s why the hawks don’t catch them, don’t see them up there in the high blue sky near the sun!”
Director Erica Schmidt’s production – on a set that designer Amy Rubin has closely fashioned (too closely?) on Williams’ instructions – is commendable. Alexander uses his hurt eyes and loose body language to reveal Val’s eventually doomed predicament. Siff, with a somewhat odd (Italian?) accent, signals unquenchable torment throughout. An excellent ensemble helps immeasurably, certainly McDermott, Reeder, Cullen, Keane, Fiana Tóibín as harshly observant Nurse Porter, and James Waterston as the Cutrere scion who done a pregnant Lady wrong way back when.
Personal Disclosure: The first opening night I ever attended, long before I was a first-night critic, was the 1957 Broadway opening of Orpheus Descending . Although my memory of the play that night isn’t entirely clear, I do recall being simultaneously disappointed and fascinated. Curiously, I had the same reaction this time around.
Orpheus Descending opened July 18, 2023, at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center and runs through August 6. Tickets and information: tfana.org
