“I can burn down a woman,” proclaims Val, the sexy, snakeskin jacket-wearing drifter in Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending. The line is emblematic of the overheated nature of the 1957 drama (although let’s face it, most of Williams’ plays are overheated) and if delivered by the right actor – say, Marlon Brando, in the film version The Fugitive Kind – it doesn’t seem like an idle boast. Unfortunately, in the new Theatre for a New Audience revival directed by Erica Schmidt, the line, as delivered by Pico Alexander, conveys all the forcefulness of an elementary school student giving an apple to his teacher.
The actor certainly has the requisite physical aspects of the role, being tall, lanky and disarmingly handsome. But an air of danger seems beyond him, and the lack of tension, sexual or otherwise, saps the air out of the production. Which, when you’re attempting to put on one of Williams’ most problematic, second-tier works, proves a significant drawback.
Similarly miscast is Maggie Siff as Lady Torrance, the Italian wife of a much older, dying Southern redneck, who’s trying to run a general store by herself and impulsively hires Val to work for her. Siff, so good in such television shows as Mad Men and Billions, delivers a rich and vibrant performance, marred only by an accent that sounds more Eastern European than Italian. But she possesses a natural physical elegance that doesn’t quite work for her earthy, sexually repressed character. In Peter Hall’s operatic 1989 Broadway revival, Vanessa Redgrave had a similar problem, but she overcame it via sheer force of will. Maureen Stapleton, in the original Broadway production, must have nailed it.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
The play is rarely done these days, and not without reason. Loosely, and I mean loosely, based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, it’s the sort of overstuffed, florid melodrama that works only because of the poetical beauty of the playwright’s language and his gift for psychologically astute if over-the-top characterizations. It’s extremely difficult to pull off under the best of circumstances, and this only intermittently effective revival doesn’t quite manage it, although it earns points for trying.
The supporting players generally fare better, with Julia McDermott as the free spirited, wanton Carol and Ana Reeder as the religiously fanatical Vee proving effective in their high-pitched characterizations. But one of the problems of the play is that there are too many characters who don’t have much to do other than provide appropriately Southern Gothic atmosphere. The result is that it seems to take forever to get to the meaty stuff, namely the sexually charged and ultimately doomed relationship between the two main figures, which in this case never catches fire.
Schmidt’s direction seems at once too restrained and too emphatic, the latter illustrated by the loud banging on the floor by Lady’s husband that sound less like the frustrated acting out of a terminally ill man than mortar rounds being fired close by. The violent climax, which should be shocking, doesn’t work at all. And Amy Rubin’s set design depicting the general store feels cramped despite the large stage, with several scenes performed in the bare wings as if the production was still in rehearsal.
Williams completists will want to take advantage of this production of the rarely performed work, and it has enough worthwhile elements to make it worth the nearly three-hour investment. But this revival, like the play’s previous incarnations, mainly proves that Orpheus Descending never really works.
