As I drove along I-95 from Boston to the Berkshires last week, I kept thinking back to my first Williamstown Theatre Festival visit. For me, the main attraction in the summer of 1988 was the annual Free Theater outdoor event, an adaptation of Tom Jones by my buddy, the late Steve Lawson, that would play out on the rolling field known as Poker Flats. The late George Wendt, then in his Cheers heyday, toplined as Squire Western, but the bulk of the cast were the unpaid apprentices: the theater kids working – overworking – at all manner of menial tasks in the main building, for an opportunity to hobnob with Broadway names and play occasional small parts. They could perform at nightly Cabarets, too, but the Free event, only in its second year in ’88, was their real chance to shine. And did they ever, with all the exuberance of talented youth let loose on prime material.
A lot of change has come to what was once a summer-long cavalcade of high-profile work. In the wake of money woes, a crippling pandemic and labor disputes, all well-publicized, there was doubt that WTF could come back in any meaningful form. But “W71,” as this 71st season has been dubbed, was designed to take a sharp pivot toward transformation and hoped-for survival, with major artist Jeremy O. Harris (Slave Play) stepping up as creative director of a fully-curated event in celebration of one of America’s foremost playwrights. For three consecutive weekends, Williamstown would become “Williams Town,” the site of eight programmed events – theater, music, dance, opera, comedy, even a display of ice dancing – bolstered by pop-ups and art installations, all dedicated to Tennessee Williams’s legacy.
I was eager for the immersion. So, evidently, were crowds of theatergoers, young and old, racially and ethnically diverse. Those I spoke with all seemed to harbor hopes for a return to past magic, and to a significant extent W71 succeeded. The large-group dynamic was missing, but the old shared excitement was more often felt than not.
★★★☆☆ Not About Nightingales
Playwright-director Robert O’Hara (Bootycandy) offers an earnest and respectful staging of this early (1938) Williams work, which had gone unproduced and forgotten until Vanessa Redgrave, of all people, found and brought it to Trevor Nunn and the Royal National Theatre, 60 years after its creation. It takes place in a painfully overcrowded, Depression-era urban prison, commanded erratically by a sadistic Warden (Chris Messina) who will sacrifice everything, loyal employees and inmates alike, for the sake of power. Inspired by real-life events, the raw narrative owes even more to the Warner Bros. prison pictures of the era, especially one in which a trusty (William Jackson Harper as “Jim”) has to decide whether to protest abuse, or stay silent to protect his upcoming parole.
The action pivots among the push-and-pull of inmate society overseen by the brutal Butch (Brian Geraghty); the warden’s increasing instability; and the burgeoning romance between Jim and Eva (Elizabeth Lail), the secretary whose naivete must recede when the big boss sets his cap for her. Such cinematic shifts require more fluent set changes than designer Diggle can provide, and two misconceived performances set the balance off-kilter. Trapped in a monotonous laissez les bons temps rouler accent, Messina never exudes the menace his role demands. Meanwhile, Geraghty fails to realize that Butch – a sexual predator, after all – must be forced to the same pitch of insanity as the warden he despises; he is tiresomely one-note as an orator straight out of Clifford Odets at his most tendentious.
Still, the company overall is fluid and fluent, and the action decisively moves forward in suspense and excitement, culminating when the rebellious cons are herded into “Klondike,” the boiler room whose deadly temperature rises to 150o. A different kind of heat is created by Harper and Lail, whose every scene is marked by compelling shifts in mood and intention. They’re simply wonderful, and I can list a dozen other plays I’d kill to see them enact together.
★★☆☆☆ Camino Real
Williams’s 1953 allegorical pageant is probably the work of his I most cherish. An unpopular opinion, I concede. But his vision of the end of life at a crossroads in a Central American town is a big fat swing for the fences, one that never fails to captivate me. It’s populated by archetypes and fictional characters, caught between a luxury hotel on one side of the street and the Ritz Men Only flophouse opposite; caught, that is to say, between a lonely death and mystical transcendence. For me, it brims with humor and heartbreak, imagination and eloquence. It’s got everything.
Pulling off a play-with-everything, however, is a tall order, and the WTF mounting of this large-cast rarity is not destined to persuade many spectators to share my enthusiasm. The previous work of Obie-winning director Dustin Wills is not known to me, but on this evidence he seems to prize interesting stage pictures, including little Magritte touches, over verbal precision or thematic coherence. Of the two major name performers, conceiving love-crazed Marguerite Gautier (a/k/a Garbo’s Camille) as a camp virago in a black dress and wild blonde hair was a bold usage of Pamela Anderson, and the strapping Nicholas Alexander Chavez (Lyle Menendez in the Monsters miniseries) would seem perfectly cast as Kilroy, the idealistic boxer with “a heart as big as a baby.” But with Chavez rushing and swallowing his words, and Anderson’s words going largely unheard, their scenes separately and together in act one are puzzles one has to work to solve on the fly. By the second act, those who choose to remain can hear both actors more clearly, and are offered beautiful turns by April Matthis as a gutsy, cynical fortune-teller and Whitney Peak as her impressionable daughter. All things considered, this episodic, difficult play needs extra care to develop momentum, and unlike Not About Nightingales, only fitfully receives it.
★★★★★ Vanessa
The indisputable artistic triumph of W71 has been brought in from NYC: Heartbeat Opera’s 100-minute adaptation – with a cast reduced to five and a brand new orchestration – of the Samuel Barber / Gian-Carlo Menotti opera that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1958 and has been virtually forgotten since. I shouldn’t think it will remain so, now that adaptor Jacob Ashworth, director R.B. Schlather, lighting designer Yuki Nakase Link, and musical directors Ashworth and Dan Schlosberg have unearthed such a stark, tightly-wound romantic melodrama out of the material. As for its appropriateness to the Fest, the synopsis seems to engage in a dialogue with Tennessee Williams’s preoccupations with neuroticism and lust. The titular Vanessa (Inna Dukach), a wealthy middle-aged baroness, awaits the reappearance after 20 years of her long-lost lover Anatol. He’s dead, but Anatol Jr. (Roy Hage) is not, and he proceeds in winning the heart not just of Vanessa, but of her love-starved niece Erika (Ori Marcu), whom he impregnates and abandons, leading to an appropriately somber denouement. The entire company in white and black performs against a white wall, their intricate shadows echoing the shadows of past love and mortality that hang over the castle like a shroud. Thrillingly sung in English in the intimate “Annex” (a one-time supermarket, you heard right, now owned by the Festival as an all-use space), Vanessa grabs the audience like a vise. Unforgettable, truly.
The Rest of the Fest
An ambitious new work by Harris set on a remote beach populated by mescal brewers and visiting gay Americans, starring a radiant Amber Heard along with Ato Blankson-Wood, Brandon Flynn and Zachary Booth, Spirit of the People was not offered for review, though its themes, love of Mexico, and exposed flesh would all strike a welcome chord in Tennessee Williams and his fans. So would The Gig: After Moise and the World of Reason, the aforementioned ice dancing event staged in a local hockey rink. With five prodigious performers clad in polyester, skating through patterns choreographed by Will Davis and Douglas Webster as disco hits were piped into individual sets of headphones, this salute to the 70s was a hell of a lot more entertaining than the Williams novella which inspired it. (I have twice tried to get through Moise and the World of Reason, fortified once with black coffee and another time with booze and a cold shower. No dice either way.) I’ll draw a veil over the late-night “comedy” that elicited only groans, and happily recall two impressive personal projects. The Seattle-based Ahamefule J. Oluo presented The Things Around Us, a Garrison Keillor-ish set of stories on the fragility of life and livelihood, told by Oluo as he provided his own electronic and live accompaniment, a one-man band like you’ve never heard before. Later, Monica Bill Barnes – an astonishing dancing sprite – and narrator Robbie Saenz de Viteri brought us Many Happy Returns, a tribute to lifelong friendship that had everyone tapping their toes to the oldies. Not much connection to Williams in either show, other than welcome demonstrations of the joy that personal artistry in a shared intimate space can generate, which Tenn knew well.
