The National Post, January 09, 2007
From Italy, with a valentine
By: Robert Cushman
Seana McKenna, playing Lady Torrance in Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending, begins as a hard-bitten retailer who is not about to take any guff from anyone. Lady is the daughter of an Italian immigrant -- at various times she refers to him and herself as "wops" and "dagoes" -- who settled in a small town in the deepest South and ran a winery there; that is, until he and it were set on fire by longer standing residents who objected to the proprietor's selling drinks to black people.
Lady subsequently married, or as she tells it was bought by, Jabe Torrance, a much older merchant whom she hates and who has now fallen gravely ill, leaving her to mind the store. Also in Lady's past are a rich younger lover and a miscarried child. She is, when we first meet her, one angry, bitter and sarcastic Lady.
Into town, into the store and into her life comes Val Xavier, a glamorous young vagrant of 30, who might be the Williams dream male personified. He's a reformed stud; he wears a snakeskin jacket that's his most treasured possession save only for his guitar, which carries autographs of idols from Leadbelly to Satchmo; and he claims, among other picturesque things, that his temperature is always a couple of degrees above normal, "same as a dog's." He also claims an impressive track record in warming up women. Lady, who could use some warming, eyes him at first with sardonic distrust, an emotion that McKenna communicates superbly.
In fact, she does everything superbly. Hers is as complete a performance as ever I have seen in Toronto, distinguished by the way it blends wit with passion. She lives each moment with full-blooded intensity, and links each to the next with flawless logic. She melts to Val of course, as he to her, but her knife-edge never dulls. The play's climax takes her on a rattletrap progress from vengeance to triumph to tragedy, and her end, after she has been so fully alive, could hardly hurt more. It's impossible while watching her to imagine the part played by anybody else. The contact between her and Jonathan Goad's Val, especially in their first long scene of approach and avoidance, is exemplary in its tautness and variety.
Miles Potter's production, announced in the program as "based on the 2005 Stratford Festival production," is that same terrific staging with a re-angled set and a handful of cast changes. Peter Hartwell has straightened out the bar counter that dominated his set on the platform stage of the Tom Patterson, from horseshoe to horizontal. We lose some surprise entrances but, surprisingly in a larger theatre, we gain concentration; and the counter now makes an even more effective platform for Val's humiliation at the hands of the local yokels. Goad's performance, always good, is now even better. Val is probably a harder role than Lady -- she's a person with a documented history, he's an ideal whose past is kept determinedly cloudy -- but Goad earths him with unassuming self-confidence. (Critics love to be oxymoronic, but this time it fits.)
As at Stratford, I kept changing my mind about the play itself, thinking it at one moment Williams' masterpiece, and at the next a supreme act of unwitting self-parody. Potter admits in his program note, "it's not clean, it's not neat, it doesn't tie up," but says that's its glory.
In fact, though, his triumph has been to take a piece that doesn't make logical sense and to treat it as if, at least moment by moment, it does. Hence it also makes emotional sense; more than a slapdash, self consciously "bold" production could hope to do. This is an ensemble show with all the connecting lines in place. Disconnected parts of the Orpheus myth -- his musicianship, his descent into a Hell here identified with darkest Dixie, his final immolation -- are scrambled together and fastened onto Val, who is less a characterization than a collage.
It may also have too many characters, or at least too many given intriguing traits that aren't developed. The most persistent and alluring is Carol, the county tramp who sees Val as a kindred lost, or freed, soul; she's given an electrically bedraggled performance by Dana Green. But all the actors seize their chances. Michelle Fisk and Brigit Wilson are delightfully censorious as the town biddies who complain in their turn of other citizens indulging in "hypocriticism" -- another thread that's left undeveloped.
Catherine Fitch is haunting as the sheriff 's wife, who paints visionary pictures while going progressively blind, and Thom Marriott powerfully impassive as her husband who claims, ambiguously, to hate violence. Walter Borden irrupts periodically as the painted-faced Uncle Pleasant with his "Choctaw call" that serves as both Val's fanfare and his epitaph, and David Francis, with monstrously protruding eyebrows, conveys all the hatred festering in the dying Jabe, though not all the murderous power -- though this is the one point at which the production itself falters. Costumes, music, lighting and sound are all ideal. This is as close to a definitive performance as we will see, anywhere. Grab it.