Winnipeg Sun, November 25, 2006
MTC raises a little hell in Orpheus Descending
By: Pat St. Germain
A dead sexy stranger, an unhappy wife and a gaggle of small-town Southern harpies -- it's a classic recipe for dramatic disaster. But the story is all in the telling in Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending at Manitoba Theatre Centre.
Reprising their roles from the 2005 hit production at Stratford, leads Jonathan Goad and Seana McKenna give off a natural shine as guitar-slinging drifter Valentine Xavier and a repressed storekeeper, Lady Torrance, in whom he resurrects a long-dormant lust for life.
The amusingly droll, worldweary daughter of an immigrant Italian bootlegger who was killed by the local version of the Ku Klux Klan several years earlier, Lady is married to a foul old demon who's taking his sweet time dying from a terminal illness.
When the footloose Val arrives on the scene, he's a combination of angelic-voiced saviour and walking temptation in a snakeskin jacket. Like the doomed gigolo in John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, he's also "a good time not yet had by all." And at the age of 30, he's determined to retain his born-again purity -- a state that doesn't sit well with some scorned local ladies.
Val's arrival naturally stirs up the local menfolk, too, from the standard mean ol' boy Southern sheriff to the petty hangers-on and bullies at the beck and call of old man Jabe Torrance (David Francis). The hellish little town is surprisingly well-populated, with a fallen-angel barfly (Dana Green), nutty religious visionary and painter of Freudian eyesores Vee Talbott (standout kook Catherine Fitch), racist bigots and a gossip-mongering Greek chorus of prudish old crones and officious middle-age matrons.
In case audiences forget the play is a retelling of the Orpheus myth -- the musician-hero descends to the underworld to bring his true love back to the land of the living, only to lose her again -- Williams' script is packed with ham-fisted reminders. Lady's existence is a living death, she longs to take wing, yadda yadda yadda. And while the characters are compelling, there's a sense they're detached from the audience.
But that's OK. With its conversational exposition and sides of small-town dish, this tale is engaging from start to finish.
ORPHEUS DESCENDING
Until Dec. 16 @ MTC.