The Globe and Mail, June 25, 2005
Slow burn in a hellhole never looked so good
By: Kamal Al-Solaylee
If Orpheus Descending is truly one of Tennessee Williams's minor, less-accomplished plays, you wouldn't know it from Miles Potter's transcendent production that opened Thursday at the Stratford Festival. Potter proves that the real test of a play is not its place in the literary canon, or the frequency of its revivals, but in whether it can be convincingly brought to life on stage or not. For the other side of the same coin at Stratford, examine if you will the tedious production of Williams's highly regarded and popular Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, currently playing at the Avon Theatre. Enough said.
With Orpheus Descending, Potter has his work cut out for him. As he writes in the program notes, the play is "not clean, it's not neat, it doesn't tie up." It's the story of the guitar-strumming sexy drifter Valentine Xavier (Jonathan Goad), who lands a job in a dry-goods store run by Lady Torrance (Seana McKenna), the daughter of an Italian immigrant who was burnt alive by a racist mob for selling liquor to a black person. The time, naturally, is the 1950s and the place is a small town deep in the heart of the American South, where gossip and gothic dominate. From a gallery of townspeople, Williams highlights two other women for whom Valentine represents hope and salvation in very different ways: the irrepressible, get-me-out-of-this-hellhole Carol Cutrere (Dana Green) and Vee Talbott (Sarah McVie), the sheriff's wife, a painter with a clear case of religious hysteria.
Mythology looms large in the text and in Potter's production. As the title suggests, the play is, in part, a reworking of the Greek myth of Orpheus, the musician who descends into the underworld to plead for the return of his dead wife. Williams is more concerned with the mythology of America, and the Southern parts of it in particular. "This country used to be wild," says Carol, referring not to the Wild West but to the natural and spiritual gravity of both its indigenous and of its black population. Potter's production highlights the sense of lost wonder that has been replaced with "neon" and "corruption."
The world outside the Torrance store is threatening, frightening and downright horrific -- thunder roars, and vicious dogs tear into victims whose screams no door can shut out. Kevin Fraser's lighting design evokes this sense of dread wonderfully against Peter Hartwell's spare set. It's a world both grandly gothic and ever so real, where racial and sexual "others" are rounded up and can consider themselves lucky if they get kicked out of town alive.
With the context of time and place unequivocally set up, the production can focus on the many lost souls who inhabit it. A superb cast delivers the goods, and then some. In smaller parts as the town's gossipmongers Beulah and Dolly, both Fiona Reid and Brigit Wilson add the right amount of comic touches to the unrelenting story of doom and gloom. As Lady's dying husband Jabe, David Francis is suitably authoritarian, while Michelle Giroux nails her icy Nurse Porter to both chilling and comic effects. McVie makes the most of a role that is equally under- and overwritten.
But despite its seemingly overpopulated world, the sympathies of Orpheus Descending lie firmly in favour of Carol, Val and Lady. It's not a love triangle by any means but the three are locked in together for better or, more truthfully, worse. To say that Dana Green is a sensation as Carol is an understatement: Her wildness always reveals the little-girl-lost underneath, and it's not by chance that the play ends with her alone on-stage. She is both the typical victim much beloved by Williams and now his (and the audience's) only hope for a free and liberated society in America's future.
Watch Goad and McKenna tackle Val and Lady and you get a lesson on how performances are built up and paced gradually in the course of three acts. Slow burn (no pun intended in a play where fire is more than a religious symbol) never looked so good. It's not a question of sexual chemistry, since Val makes it clear that he's through with his womanizing ways just as plausibly as Lady's need for him transcends the simply romantic. It's a matter of seeking and finding refuge in each other -- an emotional and spiritual bond that their society has no term or tolerance for. That both are violently crushed at the end doesn't lessen the nobility of the characters' struggle or the triumph of the two performers who have brought them to life so expertly and, above all, defiantly. Williams would have been so proud of this sweet defeat.
Orpheus Descending continues at the Tom Patterson Theatre in Stratford, Ont., until Sept. 25 (800-567-1600).