Finding Tennessee

A new production of the lost plays of Tennessee Williams reveal new information about the iconic playwright

BY MICHAEL KEARNS

"I would say that there is something much bigger in life, and death, than we have become aware of (or adequately recorded) in our living and dying. And further, to compound this shameless romanticism, I would say that our serious theatre is a search for that something (that is not yet successful but is still going on)." —Tennessee Williams, 1959

“It was like finding a lost treasure,” says producer Jon Imparato of The Lost Plays of Tennesee Williams, a collection of three recently exhumed one-acts by the renowned gay playwright. “Well, at least for us theater queens.”

Theater queens have long identified with the queer leitmotifs that mark Williams' lugubrious genius. One of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century, his volume of work sprang from an ocean of heartbreaking quirkiness, resulting in a catalogue of plays that remain divinely theatrical, marked by tremulous emotion and lush lyricism.

“I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person,” Williams said. “But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.”

“The plays were discovered a few years ago,” Imparato says, “archived with his manuscripts.” The three short plays—Mister Paradise, And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens, and The Paolooka—would likely never have been produced in Williams' lifetime (1911-1983). Even though the terrain that Williams covered in his plays (A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, The Night of the Iguana, Summer and Smoke) was considered stunningly realistic, his dance with homosexuality was often blurred because of the restraints imposed by a generation that was squeamish about queerness in neon.

The Paolooka, according to Imparato, promises “homoerotic overtones. It's a short piece about two boxers and it is a very male, testosterone-driven, Hemingway-esque piece that you would never believe Williams wrote.

“The plays are unlike anything he has ever written and they are as beautiful as anything he has ever written.”

Los Angeles theatre vet Jack Heller directs and performs in the loving tribute to Williams. “The play I'm directing, which he wrote in the fifties—And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens—could never have been produced then,” Heller says.

It is, according to the actor-director, “Williams' most openly gay play. He didn't want it done because back in the fifties the subject matter was absolutely taboo and probably would have ended Tennessee's career. You would never have seen a transvestite or a man refer to another man as his husband on Broadway or off-Broadway. In England at that time, everyone involved in this production would have been arrested.”

Aside from self-avowed “theater queens,” who would benefit from the words of Williams in a world where art is shamelessly without restrictions and just as often presented without a modicum of skill? “Young people can learn so much about our own history by experiencing these plays,” Imparato says. “They will get to experience gay life in the late fifties.

“The freedom that young people today get to enjoy came at a high price.”

The high price that Williams paid was notorious. One might say that he was a victim who, like Blanche DuBois, may have “depended on the kindness of strangers,” but was, instead, often met with ridicule and virtual banishment. In spite of his soaring success, the playwright—a rara avis among his contemporaries—was always poised on the precipice of self-immolation.

In Mr. Paradise, Heller essays the title role of a down and out writer who, he says, “is very similar to Tennessee. The play is really about how art will always survive despite wars and destruction of all kinds.”

In a bit of twisted poetry that Williams would savor, the artists associated with The Lost Plays of Tennessee Williams are certainly the kindest of strangers who, by inhabiting his world, become the writer's truest friends. Call it “shameless romanticism” or, perhaps, the immortality of art in which the artist is constantly be rediscovered.

The Lost Plays of Tennessee Williams, benefiting the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center, will be performed through June 8 at The L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center's Village at Ed Gould Plaza, 1125 N. McCadden Pl., L.A. $20 For tickets, visit www.lagaycenter.org, or call 323/860-7300.

ON STAGE

Concrete Folk Variations: Chapter I, Death of a Sugar Daddy

The Manual Archives
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Writer/director/narrator Susan Simpson has also designed the puppet performers for this Sapphic noir production. The faces are highly detailed, albeit immobile, and the costumes are rather meticulous, yet the limbs are crudely executed, and their handling always looks more like the characters are in heavily assisted living rather than existing outside the puppet convention. The story, beginning as it does after the death of the most colorful character, lesbian heiress, socialite, and social fixer "Big Lee," seems to start too late, and consists largely of the reaction of the quietly gay Loretta, who quits her job as a beat cop at the top of the show, to this turn of events. One can see what Simpson is trying to do with this noir piece, but the insidious mood of grim resignation and Simpson's flat narration makes for a slow 50 minutes. Co-narrator Julianna Parr is quite spirited, however, and Marc Amoroso, who quietly supplies some nice ambient mood guitar, is rather fetching in the bargain. —WENZEL JONES

Sweeney Todd

Ahmanson Theatre, Through Apr. 6
***

John Doyle’s thrillingly stylized direction serves the mood admirably, but some of the secondary aspects of the story are subsumed to the overall vision that sets the story of 19th century slum London cannibalism and revenge in a madhouse. I fear the ladders and coffins are not quite as mutable as Doyle thinks. Most impressive is the fact that this accomplished cast is also quite adept on a variety of musical instruments, so much so that they constitute the orchestra as well. Judy Kaye turns in a brilliant Mrs. Lovett, never more so than during “By the Sea,” during which she sings of a future idyllic life by the shore while nonchalantly cleaning the gore from ever more gruesome tools of butchery. It’s positively gentlemanly the way David Hess, as Sweeney Todd, both owns the stage, yet graciously allows plenty of room for his co-star to shine. In a solid cast, both Edmud Bagnell as a violin-play Tobias and Lauren Molina as a Goldie Hawn-channeling Johanna are notable. —W.J.

AISLE SAY

Something Old, Something New

Revivals of beloved ancient musicals occur so frequently that's it's understandable when writers or directors are tempted to freshen things up by “fixing” elements perceived as unworkable, such as outmoded stylistic conventions, or perceived weaknesses in the shows as originally conceived. That's how we got David Henry Hwang's clever but commercially unsuccessful revisal of Flower Drum Song. Similarly, there was an attempt to take the racially offensive material out of Finian's Rainbow, which never came to fruition because the elements in question are so integral to the concept and story. Since Jason Alexander became artistic director of Reprise! Broadway's Best last year, he has been touting his goal of taking revisionist looks at favorite vintage musicals rather than pulling them from the mothballs exactly as they are. In my view, his recent transfer of the 1950s classic Damn Yankees to the 1970s with a mixed-race cast and a hodgepodge of musical styles from clashing periods was a complete failure—an incoherent desecration of a classic, adding nothing that “improved” the show while robbing it of much its original charm. Ironically, the very next Reprise show, Michael Michetti's exuberant recreation of Li'l Abner proved that even shows with quaint, outdated conventions and attitudes can still work, with no tampering required if a terrific team of triple-threat performers, designers, and musicians treat the chestnut with TLC.

Which brings me to the next matter. The 36-year-old FCLO Music Theatre, a splendid organization-one of the best-kept musical-theatre secrets in the Southland-recently offered director-choreographer Sha Newman's loving and faithful revisit to the Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim-Jerome Robbins-Arthur Laurents masterpiece West Side Story. It shimmered with the power of grand opera, graced with musical splendor, heart-wrenching drama, Broadway-caliber performances, and a spectacular professional sheen. Founders Griff and Jan Duncan fight a never-ending battle to satisfy their audiences, with almost no commercially viable properties coming from Broadway anymore (Guettel, Sondheim, and Spring Awakening aren't exactly mass-audience shows). Meanwhile, conservative audiences are finally getting their fill of the umpteenth rehashes of The Sound of Music or Guys and Dolls. According to Griff, the group's original name—Fullerton Civic Light Opera—was recently revised, to avoid misperceptions that it was an opera organization or a community theatre. The civic-light-opera term appears to be a product of a bygone era. Do yourself a favor and check out one of the upcoming FLCO season shows-Oliver!, Oil City Symphony, or Oklahoma! For more information, visit www.fclo.com. —LES SPINDLE