Toronto Star, January 08, 2007
Second time not charmed
By: Richard Ouzounian
When Miles Potter's production of Orpheus Descending opened at the Stratford Festival in the summer of 2005, it was a revelation. This often-overlooked play by Tennessee Williams burst onto the stage with passion and poetry to spare.
Seana McKenna and Jonathan Goad headed an exemplary cast, and Potter's staging used the long three-sided rectangular stage of the Tom Patterson Theatre with energy and imagination.
The show which opened last night at the Royal Alexandra Theatre is billed in very small print as "based on the 2005 Stratford Festival Production," but although all the major creative personnel are the same, the final effect isn't quite as stunning.
Orpheus Descending is still a highly effective piece of theatre, but something is now slightly askew. It's like taking a work of art and putting a different frame around it. That small change shouldn't make such a difference, but it does.
Williams' script tells the story of Val Xavier, a drifter who wanders into a small Southern town that is neither as sweet nor as sleepy as it initially seems. An Italian woman named Lady is married to the dying tyrant Jabe Torrance and runs his dry goods store while he perishes in an upstairs bedroom.
There's also a bruised victim named Carol Cutrere, an assortment of small-town gossips, a mystic painter, a shaman-like voodoo presence named Uncle Pleasant and some menacingly stupid local toughs.
Yes, it does initially look like a compendium of Williams cliches, but it's much more than that. There are deep rivers of loneliness running through the lives of the three leading characters - Val, Lady and Carol - and the way they each look for solace in the person least able to offer it to them makes for heart-rending drama.
Goad is endlessly winning as Val, with his snakeskin jacket, iconic guitar and slightly crooked grin. Yet he gives us much more than surface charm, taking us to the heart of a man who feels he has allowed himself to be deeply corrupted and must fight for his own redemption.
He's well matched by McKenna, who burns with a low cool flame for the first two of the play's three acts, only to burst into an emotional conflagration when the moment is right. She runs the obstacle course of Williams' myriad impulses with bravura style, giving us bitter hatred, glowing love and shrill mockery all in a minute.
Dana Green whirls into the play like a glittering dervish bent on self-destruction and each time she reappears, we see how much nearer the bottom she has gone. She could settle for giving us the trashy gal, but she imbues her with tragic dignity as well.
Michelle Fisk and Brigit Wilson are effective as the local harpies, Catherine Fitch does wonders with the otherworldly Vee and Thom Marriott shows us that menace is twice as effective when underplayed
But, in the end, the whole thing isn't quite as thrilling as it was before. In moving the action from its three-sided staging at Stratford to a conventional proscenium in Toronto, Potter has lost the overall feel that made his first reading work so well.
Together with designer Peter Hartwell, he gives us a starkly symbolic setting that heavy-handedly underlines the play's mythological roots in the story of Orpheus. Yes, it looks like a Greek temple, but it no longer resembles a Southern dry-goods store, and the various steps and platforms make for awkward moments in staging.
There's nothing but a black void outside the upstage centre doorway that everyone enters or exits through and while it may seem eerily universal, we lose a lot by not feeling there's a real world out there.
It's still a fine play with a cast well worth seeing, but the theatrical electricity that flashed through the air at Stratford 2005 is considerably dimmer in Toronto 2007.