Winnipeg Sun, November 23, 2006
'Orpheus Descending' on the move
By: Pat St. Germain
Why go to Stratford when Stratford's leading lights will come to us?
Based on one of the hottest tickets of the Ontario festival's 2005 season, Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending opens tonight at Manitoba Theatre Centre, en route to a Toronto run with MTC collaborator Mirvish Productions.
Jonathan Goad reprises his role as studly drifter Val Xavier opposite venerated leading lady Seana McKenna, with an 18-member cast including fellow Stratford originals David Francis (Napoleon), Joyce Campion (Elizabeth Rex) and Dana Green (Early Edition) and director Miles Potter -- a veteran of several MTC productions with his wife McKenna.
"It's interesting to come back to a play a year later. I've never done that -- there's something so profound about it," Goad says. "You begin to find the Zen of it."
His guitar-slinging, snakeskin jacket-sporting Val blows into a small southern town and sets feminine hearts aflutter, ruffling a few feathers among the locals when he sticks around to work in the unhappily married Lady Torrance's (McKenna) store.
Williams described the character as a "fox in a chicken coop" -- a comparison that doesn't bode well for Val or Lady. She's initially wary, but Val revives her passion for life, although Goad, 35, says the star-crossed duo's romance is much deeper than animal attraction.
"It exists in a platonic way," he says. "The relationship between Val and Lady ... goes from friendly to sensual to sexual."
Williams' take on the Greek myth of Orpheus -- the musician descends to the underworld to bring his wife back to the land of the living only to lose her again -- had a rocky start in 1940 as a play called Battle of Angels. Rewritten over 17 years, Orpheus Descending had an inauspicious Broadway debut in 1957 but half a century later it struck a chord with Stratford audiences.
"People came out to see it and came to see it again," Goad says. "The play is strange. It's mysterious, but it does seem to connect with people on a particular level, on a level you can't quite articulate."
The new MTC/Mirvish production, which opens in Toronto Jan. 3, features Winnipeg's Keith James (The Innocent Eye Test), along with several familiar faces based in Toronto, including David Ferry (Paradise Falls), Walter Borden (Lexx) and Catherine Fitch -- well known as the drug-addled Rosemary in This is Wonderland or the stage manager in Slings & Arrows, Fitch also appeared in locally lensed movie Niagara Motel. Since the play deals with repression and racism and smalltown hell on Earth, most of the cast are not in sympathetic roles. But Goad says he's more comfortable in character Val's snakeskin all the time.
After seven years at Stratford and a handful of TV projects (Mutant X, Hockey: A People's History), the actor says scheduling conflicts have ended several past flirtations with MTC. But he's in good company for his debut.
McKenna has starred in several Williams works, including MTC productions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire, both directed by Potter. Her Lady is an outsider who has never been able to depend on the kindness of strangers or friends -- her Italian immigrant father was murdered years earlier, she had a disastrous love affair and is miserable in her marriage to the terminally ill Jabe Torrance (Francis).
When Val offers her a glimpse of freedom, you can't blame her for reaching out.
"It's a play really about what we all search for, and that is connection," Goad says. "And the show fearlessly goes and confronts that question."
Goad plans to make a serious connection in real life between runs at MTC and in Toronto. He and fellow Stratford actress Adrienne Gould are taking advantage of the 10-day break to get married.