'Torch Song Trilogy'

I happened to be visiting my mother in Bethesda in September when she and a friend had tickets for the Studio Theatre revival of Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy, so I joined them for the Saturday matinee performance on 21 September in the Studio’s home space in the Logan Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C.  (Logan Circle, in downtown D.C., is a recently gentrified and revived neighborhood that sort of resembles, in tone and function but not architecture, New York City’s SoHo—full of art galleries, restaurants, bars, boutiques and antique shops, and theaters.  The Studio Theatre, one of Washington’s oldest rep companies, moved into a multi-theater building there some years ago from another location.)  I hadn’t seen the New York stagings of Torch Song, either at La MaMa E.T.C. or on Broadway.

At La MaMa, the three plays in the trilogy, The International Stud, Fugue in a Nursery, and Widows and Children First!, were presented separately in 1978 and ’79, then Fierstein put them together under the title Torch Song Trilogy for an uptown Manhattan production by John Glines at the Richard Alan Center in October 1981.  The combined show didn’t do well at the box office and was about to close early when a couple of late reviews appeared, praising the plays (one of which was Mel Gussow’s New York Times notice), and the production took off, moving first to the Actors Theatre in Greenwich Village in January 1982 (with Fierstein, Matthew Broderick as foster son David, and Estelle Getty as Arnold’s mother) and then transferring to Broadway’s Little Theatre (now the Helen Hayes) in June, where it ran for 1,222 performances (with Fisher Stevens replacing Broderick) and won two Tony Awards, including Best Play and a Best Actor nod for Fierstein himself.  Torch Song made Fierstein a star (he went on to play, among other notable roles, Edna Turnblad in the stage-musical adaptation of Hairspray, for which he won his fourth Tony in 2003) and has had a stage life around the country ever since then.  The current Washington production, which began performances on 4 September in the Studio’s Mead Theatre and runs through 29 December, is directed by Michael Kahn, the artistic director of the Capital’s Shakespeare Theatre Company.

Torch Song Trilogy is based on Fierstein’s own autobiography.  According to the Studio Theatre’s subscriber newsletter, Studio Sightlines, the underemployed actor went through “a whirlwind romance that soon started to unravel” in 1977.  Not unlike many theater people, he saw the theatrical possibilities even as he went through the pain of the break-up: “Even during the last four-hour phone call, I’d keep thinking, ‘Hmmm, that’s good—better write that down.’”  Depressed, the writer says a therapist friend told him he’d either “kill himself or write a play about it.”  So, he wrote one.

Originally, Fierstein says, he had no plans to write a trilogy.  He approached La MaMa's Ellen Stewart (about whom I’ve written on ROT in “The Pushcart Theater: Ellen Stewart (1919-2011)” on 4 April 2011) and arranged a slot for the first one-act of the eventual series.  Then a friend suggested pitching a trilogy and Stewart bought the idea and the three short plays each premièred at La MaMa over a two-year period.  The playwright combined the plays into a single script called Torch Song Trilogy which was presented uptown in 1981 before the moves to Off-Broadway and then Broadway.  It was one of the first (if not the first) works with openly gay themes to play on the Great White Way, at least half a decade before gay characters and stories entered the mainstream of American culture.  (Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, a seminal gay play, débuted in New York in 1968, but it was Off-Broadway, then still a more welcoming venue for challenging work.  Though individual gay characters had appeared on Broadway, early Broadway fare did touch on homosexuality but they mostly either hinted at the subject, like William Inge’s The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, 1957-59, or they tiptoed around it delicately as in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, 1934-36, and Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy, 1953-55.)  “What Harvey proves,“ says producer John Glines, “Is that you can use a gay context and a gay experience and speak in universal truths.”

 

Fierstein began his professional career as a female impersonator in East Village cabarets when he was still in high school; Ethel Merman was a favorite character in his routines (which may have been a foundation for his gig as Edna Turnblad).  He soon expanded his repertoire and gained a reputation in the downtown scene of New York’s nightclubs and boîtes.  He studied painting and art education at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, his home borough, after graduating, but continued to audition.  Andy Warhol cast the “zaftig, gravelly voiced” would-be performer in Pork at La MaMa in 1971 (when he was still 16), and then Fierstein began his own playwriting efforts to create appropriate roles for himself.  When Ellen Stewart presented the first part of Torch Song, Fierstein’s career path changed substantially.  He continued to perform (as his role in Hairspray attests), but he’s best known these days as a playwright and librettist with such credits as the book for La Cage aux Folles (1983-87, his third Tony), followed by Legs Diamond (1988-89), A Catered Affair (2008), Newsies (opened 2012 and still going), and Kinky Boots (opened in April and still running).  He also wrote another trilogy of one-acts, Safe Sex (1987), and adapted Torch Song for the big screen in 1988 (in which he also appeared with Anne Bancroft as Arnold’s mother and Matthew Broderick this time as Alan).  Fierstein is also a well-recognized activist for gay causes and issues.

Torch Song, set in the early and late 1970s, centers on Arnold Beckoff (the Fierstein role) who sings torch songs in New York City drag clubs.  Each act of the 3½-hour trilogy focuses on a different aspect of Arnold’s life: The International Stud, the one-act with which the writer started following his busted affair, is about his meeting Ed, a bisexual teacher who hasn’t come to terms with his sexuality; Fugue in a Nursery follows a year later when Arnold meets Alan with whom he settles into an idyllic relationship as the partners plan to adopt a son until a violent act of homophobia intervenes; and Widows and Children First! finds Arnold five years later raising a gay foster son, David, and contending with his visiting mother’s judgments and narrow-mindedness.  As Fierstein acknowledges, due to his own family history “family was everything” for him, and Torch Song is really all about family—having one, finding one, building one, keeping one, mending one.  Yes, it’s about gay people, their images (including self-images), and issues (the plays were all written before the AIDS crisis was recognized, as the first-act mimed, but still graphic, backroom sex scene in the bar attests), but all the plays are fundamentally about family—biological or self-defined—and familial love and acceptance.  Like many subjects with which we’ve become (over)familiar from decades of literary treatment, when a new slant is taken, they become new again and we get to (re)consider them with new eyes.  So when Fierstein examines his family—husbands, son, mother—from the viewpoint of a gay man in a gay milieu, we get to look at those old bromides anew, and we learn all over again what’s important, especially what hurts and wounds (and, yes, Torch Song is a comedy).  At the same time, of course, the playwright makes clear, without preaching (well, there is one speech . . .), that gay people have the same needs as everyone else when it comes to love, respect, and honesty within relationships.  (We know that now, of course, in 2013—it’s been demonstrated often in the past 35 years—but back in 1978, ’79, and ’81, it wasn’t so well recognized.  Boys in the Band dealt with clichés, not what lay beneath them.) 

Because of that time lag, Torch Song is dated.  (Oddly, because the plays were all written before the advent of the AIDS crisis, they’re less dated than they might have been.)  As Peter Marks notes in his Washington Post review, “[T]he B.R. world (Before RuPaul) that Fierstein introduced us to no longer looks so unfamiliar” as it did at the start of the last quarter of the 20th century.  Nonetheless, as Marks goes on to observe, “[T]he feelings the play evokes, about being the other and yet longing for the conventional consolations of family and self-respect, remain affectingly on point.”  Aside from that, Torch Song Trilogy is a part of theater history and since I missed it the first time(s) around in New York, I’m glad I got to see it here now so I can put it into perspective in that respect as well. 

As a play, the three one-acts, even if Fierstein didn’t intend them to be conjoined, work surprisingly well as a single play.  I hadn’t realized, from what I knew of the play from hearsay gathered over the years, that the characters and situations carry over; I thought each playlet was more discrete than they actually are.  It’s really only one character that threads the fabric of the play, aside from Arnold himself; Ed appears in all three acts, but Alan dies between acts two and three and the repercussions of that aren’t seen until act three and are part of the text of the last part.  The country house that’s the setting for Fugue is mentioned in International Stud and referred to again in Widows and Children, and even the possibility of David, the about-to-be-adopted foster kid in act three, is hinted at in act two.  I don’t know how much reworking Fierstein did to make Torch Song out of the one-acts in 1981, but Mel Gussow, in his review of the Off-Broadway début of the combined plays, calls it “a carefully abridged version” of the original one-acts, and however he accomplished it, the playwright wove the three separate playlets into a more-than-acceptable (if long—the original Torch Song ran over four hours, apparently) three-act comedy-drama.  (In fact, as they now stand, you couldn’t produce the acts separately as one-acts.  I don’t know if the old versions of the scripts are still available for staging, but you’d need to find them to make individual presentations work.)

Fierstein’s writing is biting and witty, even 35 years later.  His characters’ snappish remarks and come-back one-liners still crackle and hit their marks.  Sometimes, they sound as if they’re about to be a cliché, then the playwright takes a left-hand jog and surprises me.  I suppose the whole notion of a wisecracking gay man is a stereotype by now—even The Boys in the Band used that trait as a matrix for its humor—but given Arnold’s life and personality, it fits.  (By the way, the fact that Fierstein wrote Arnold for himself—to be accurate, of course, Arnold is Fierstein—doesn’t in the least make it difficult for another actor to play the part.  In fact, Brandon Uranowitz, who’s the un-Harvey Fierstein in pretty much all respects, was dubbed “an Arnold Beckoff for all (theater) seasons” by Peter Marks.  Other area reviewers completely agreed and several already pronounced him a Hayes Award nominee.) 

The Studio’s Mead Theatre is a relatively small space, with a steeply raked house of semicircular rows of seats embracing a tiny thrust stage.  Director Kahn staged the play, with its several locales, with mostly suggested settings, designed by James Noone, depending frequently on a few carefully selected pieces of furniture.  In a scene in the middle of International Stud, after Arnold and Ed had been together for a few weeks and Ed has begun to be distant and Arnold calls him, the two apartments are represented simply by a pair of chairs with a small table and a telephone.  In Fugue, Ed and Laurel’s country house is embodied in a huge, raked bed that serves simultaneously as the hosts’ bed and Arnold and Alan’s as well—and later is also the kitchen where Arnold and Laurel wash dishes and talk (at the foot) and the barn where Alan and Ed screw (at the head).  In fact, only Widows and Children, which has a single set throughout, is a fragmentary realistic apartment where Arnold and David live.  It all works fine, though the three acts each have a slightly different staging style to match the design style.  Act one is somewhat surrealistic, with some scenes revealed on an elevated platform above the stage as a singer, Lady Blues (Ashleigh King, with a gorgeous, torchy voice), accompanied on the piano by George Fulginiti-Shakar, moves about the stage and the auditorium between scenes.  (The music for the production was composed and directed by Eric Shimelonis, who also designed the sound.)  In act two, with the giant bed from which the actors never depart (though they cover themselves with the sheets whenever they’re “off”), the performance takes on an expressionistic tone in which I was never quite sure where anyone was or who could hear and see whom.  (Lights help define the space in both acts one and two, designed by Peter West.)  Finally, as the set suggests, act three is essentially a realistic play (one reviewer calls it “sit-com-y”) with a kitchen up right—in a Jewish play, food and its preparation can’t be out of mind altogether—and a busy bathroom off right.  It sounds like the production should come out a mishmash, but it all blends in because each style suits the act aptly.  It wasn’t until afterwards that I realized what Kahn and Noone had done.  (One local review-writer observes: “This entire show has the uncanny effect of being not only authentic to the period but also a spot-on emulation of theatrical production values from the time.”  I didn’t really see that myself.)

Frank Labovitz’s ’70s costumes are period-perfect (and, yes, I remember the ’70s pretty well).  He made sure to put Arnold into fittingly flouncy and flashy duds, especially for his drag act in International Stud (which, by the way, is the name of the club where Arnold performs and where he picks up Ed the first time).  Ed, as befits his closeted persona, is dressed “straight” in jeans and a work shirt—and later in other perfectly middle-class establishment attire.  I don’t know if it’s an acting choice or a habit of Uranowitz, but his Arnold continually shifts, rewraps, or adjusts his clothing as if he were always just uncomfortable in his disguise.  (He also fusses with his mop of kinky hair as a character quirk.)  It sure looked like the actor and Noone were in cahoots so that Arnold has clothes with which he can indulge his tic.

Since I’ve introduced the performances at this point, let me go on with that.  I wondered, when the show started with Arnold’s long monologue at his backstage dressing table at the drag club, before I got used to Uranowitz, a skinny actor with “ridiculously thick hair” who flounces a lot, how Fierstein, a chunkier, gruffer-voiced guy, would have done Arnold—since I don't think he swishes quite so blatantly.   Imagine, if you can, a tall, fem Arnold Horshack, including the speech pattern!  (Now there’s a period reference!)  Nonetheless, it works perfectly well and Uranowitz’s performance conveys all of Arnold’s insecurities and dreams as well as his fierceness and compassion compellingly (though I’d probably resists saying he owns the role—that’s just a little absolute).  Todd Lawson’s Ed and Alex Mills’s Alan are both entirely convincing as Arnold’s two divergent loves.  Lawson has more of an arc to work on, sensitively going from the confused bisexual (leaning toward gay) in act one to the recovered hetero of act two to the man in act three who has finally realized where is preferences lie and is ready now to live up to them.  Mills, though his Alan is sweet and smarter than he at first sounds, has less to play but pulls off the wise-before-his-time boy-man with conviction and sympathy.  As Arnold’s mother, Gordana Rashovich brought to mind a bitchier Linda Richman, the SNL character Mike Myers used to play (“like buttah”—remember?).  The Brooklyn-Jewish accents, for both Uranowitz and Rashovich, swerve awfully close to cliché, but on the other hand, there are people who really talk like that (and not a few of them live in Fierstein’s native borough).  I mean, Fran Drescher (who’s from nearby Queens) isn’t pretending!

Sarah Grace Wilson has the most thankless role in Torch Song.  Not only is her Laurel the lone woman (aside from one Jewish mother, a wholly different category) in the play’s gay male universe, but her Laurel has broken up Arnold’s first romance, then she subtly manipulates Ed, Arnold, and even Alan throughout act two, and later tries to blackmail Ed into returning to her by falsely saying she’s pregnant.  Wilson manages to pull all this off without coming out a villain or even a gorgon, and we know that Laurel has her own needs that probably compel her behavior because Wilson doesn’t play her as ego-driven.  Of all the roles, however, only David comes off as less than convincing.  It’s not entirely Michael Lee Brown’s fault because the part is written too old: even given David’s short life of deprivation and neglect, he’s far too self-aware and introspective for a 15-year-old street kid, which Brown portrays without even a hint of bravado or the sense that he’s wearing his big brother’s clothes.  But Brown not only looks too old for the part, he carries himself like a 20-something.  (I taught a lot of both age groups—believe me, there’s a noticeable difference.)  Widows and Children is a tad contrived anyway—this is the act in which “that” speech occurs, when Arnold lets him mother have it by reciting all the play’s messages and lessons—and Brown and David only compound that problem.  David even serves as a deus ex machina when he tells Arnold to straighten his relationships with his mother and Ed out or he’s apt to split.  (It’s one of the aspects of Torch Song that marks it as the work of a tyro playwright.)

The press here was almost wholly positive, even when some reviewers had qualms going into such a potentially dated portrait of a milieu.  Marks in the Post, in addition to his effusiveness over Uranowitz’s performance, writes of “the emotional zing” of Kahn’s production of this “profound” play.  In Washington’s City Paper, Trey Graham, calling Torch Song “a rough beast of a play,” vacillates from “[b]rittle and silly one moment, hopelessly stagey in another, urgent and acid and fierce in the next.”  In the end, though, Graham feels the play fulfills its title’s promise, ending as “a narrative lament, a ballad of pain distilled, a chronicle of struggle that heals and strengthens.”  Congratulating the Studio for presenting the play, Graham also thanks Kahn “for digging thoroughly into the play to find what’s still raw and nervy and lacerating about it.”  In Washington Life Magazine, Chuck Conconi calls the “poignantly painful and wickedly humorous” Torch Song a “powerful production, smartly staged” at the Studio in Kahn’s “smart and effective” interpretation. 

On line, on Examiner.com, Kyle Osborne declares that Torch Song “looks the audience in the eye, grabs it by its collective lapels and engages them for a three act journey that mixes the joys and pains of romantic and familial relationships.”  And Elliot Lanes starts off,  “If a particular production can gage [sic] how a whole theatre season is going to be, then Torch Song Trilogy at Studio Theatre tells us that it is going to be a fantastic year of theatre here in DC” on MD Theatre Guide.  He calls Kahn’s production, “the perfect balance of comedy and pathos without going for the schmaltz,” labeling it “a must go to show” which “is still as important as it was when it first premiered” and “even more timely and urgent than ever.”  “Torch Song Trilogy . . . has been given an immensely entertaining and compassionate new production,” writes John Stoltenberg on DC Metro Theater Arts.  He adds that Kahn’s production, which “pack[s] . . . a powerful wallop,” “uncovers the emotional soul of a play that was presciently there all along.” 

Torch Song Trilogy is indubitably a snapshot of a specific time in our social history, but, as most of the reviewers admonish, it still has worthwhile things to say to us, and Michael Kahn’s mounting of the historic play at the Studio Theatre leaves no doubt on that score.  From a purely theatrical perspective, the performances and production are top-notch,  The Studio is one of D.C.’s theaters where I seldom see a bad production even when I don’t care for the script (Venus in Fur is an example, reported on ROT on 11 July 2011)—and it does usually select an interesting season.  As I said earlier, I’m glad I saw Torch Song for its theater-history significance, but I also got to see a good show, all other considerations aside.

"Uninhabitable Country: 'Five by Tenn'"

[Tennessee Williams’s 100th birthday will be this 26 March, and among the many observances, Pace University Drama will present Three From Tennessee at La MaMa E.T.C., 4-6 March. One of the one-acts in on the bill is And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens, “the first known Tennessee Williams play set in the gay world,” which was also in the repertoire seven years ago when I reviewed the opening production of the Kennedy Center’s season-long celebration of Williams, “Tennessee Williams Explored” (April-July 2004). Five by Tenn was produced by the Shakespeare Theatre Company; the rest of “Tennessee Williams Explored,” which included productions of A Streetcar Named Desire (8-31 May), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (12 June-4 July), The Glass Menagerie (17 July-8 August), and A Distant Country Called Youth, a one-man performance based on some of Williams’s early letters (11-13 June), was a production of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. (By coincidence, the letters in Distant Country are drawn from The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, a publication on which I assisted the editors.) Parallel to these events, but not formally part of “Tennessee Williams Explored,” the Washington National Opera presented the East Coast premiere of André Previn and Philip Littell’s opera adaptation of Streetcar (15 May-2 June). (The Arena Stage also produced Orpheus Descending at the Kreeger Theatre from 14 May through 27 June independently of the Kennedy Center celebration.) My review, solicited by Philip C. Kolin, review editor of the Tennessee Williams Annual Review (Robert Bray, editor), appeared in the 2004 issue (no. 7) of TWAR, on line at http://www.tennesseewilliamsstudies.org/archives/2004/r1kramer.htm. I’m republishing it below, with some emendations from another account, to coincide with Pace Drama’s presentation at La MaMa, a fitting venue since, as David Crespy, author of Off-Off-Broadway Explosion, told me “Williams was very, very important to the off-off-Broadway scene . . . . In many ways, I think he was the inspiration for off-off-Broadway.” La MaMa’s first production in 1962 was an adaptation of Williams’s short story “One Arm.”

[The other plays in the Pace Drama presentation are The Remarkable Rooming-house of Mme. Le Monde and The Pink Bedroom. Curious readers can find an essay, “The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde:Tennessee Williams's Little Shop of Comic Horrors” by Philip C. Kolin, a Williams authority, on line at http://www.tennesseewilliamsstudies.org/archives/2001/3kolin.htm, the same publication that ran my review three years later.]

* * * *

Five by Tenn

An evening of one-act plays by Tennessee Williams (with additional material compiled by Nicholas Moschovakis and David Roessel); directed by Michael Kahn; sets by Andrew Jackness; lighting by Howell Binkley; costumes by Catherine Zuber; sound by Martin Desjardins; music composed by Adam Wernick. Produced by The Shakespeare Theatre, Washington, D.C., Michael Kahn, artistic director. Presented as part of “Tennessee Williams Explored” at the Terrace Theatre, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C., Michael M. Kaiser, president.

WITH: Edward Boroevich, Kathleen Chalfant, Joshua Drew, Cameron Folmar, John Joseph Gallagher, Hunter Gilmore, Jeremy Lawrence, Brian McMonagle, Janet Patton, Thomas Jay Ryan, Carrie Specksgoor, Joan van Ark, Myk Watford

For the opening production of “Tennessee Williams Explored,” the Kennedy Center’s celebration of the man director Michael Kahn calls “the great writer in American literature,” Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre presented Five by Tenn, a selection of Williams one-acts (21 April-9 May 2004, Terrace Theater). Four of the five plays had never been previously staged and three have not been published; three—These Are the Stairs You Got to Watch, Escape, And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens . . .—were recently rediscovered by Nicholas Moschovakis and David Roessel in archives at UCLA and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. Williams had left the fourth “new” play, The Municipal Abattoir, at the home of Lee Hoiby, composer of 1971’s Summer and Smoke opera, who sent it to Kahn. The last play on the bill, I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow, has been staged several times, including on PBS (NET at the time) as part of a double Williams bill called Dragon Country (1970) and once, also directed by Kahn, for the Acting Company’s Ten From Tennessee (1986).

Kahn staged the plays more or less in order of composition, stitching them together with an avatar of Williams called The Writer (Jeremy Lawrence) who introduced the plays (and covered the scene changes) with patter drawn from Williams’s Memoirs and stage directions from the scripts. Even though several of the plays are very short, five together make a full evening—three hours—and this device only attenuated it without really adding anything. (At his first appearance, for instance, The Writer said, “A play only exists on a stage”—something of a truism.) Not that Lawrence did a bad job—he has his own one-man Williams performance—though he seemed overly effeminate, as if he were channeling Truman Capote more than Williams. Perhaps Kahn needed a connective device because the plays’ styles and themes are so different; I just wish he had thought of something simpler—and quicker.

Many of Williams’s recurrent focuses are apparent in the one-acts—“I have only one major theme for all my work,” wrote Williams to Audrey Wood, “which is the destructive impact of society on the sensitive, non-conformist individual”—but each deals with one or two topics in its own style—some quite unexpected. They do not so much tessellate as demonstrate the span of Williams’s theatrical interest and exploration over time. This is not to say that all are equally strong stage dramas. The slightest—and, perhaps, sweetest—is These Are the Stairs You Got to Watch (ca. 1941), set in a seedy, decaying New Orleans movie theater. Williams, of course, loved movies—he and his sister went often when he was little; it was obviously an escape, but he absorbed film techniques and they show up in all his plays in various ways. He also worked briefly for MGM, where he first started Glass Menagerie as a screenplay called The Gentleman Caller. (When the play was a huge success, MGM tried to sue Williams on the grounds that, as a studio employee when he began the script, they had an ownership claim to the property. The stalwart Audrey Wood fended off the suit in one of her many services to Williams during the years she represented him.) One of his early bread-and-butter jobs in New York was movie usher and in this tale of loss of innocence, a teenaged usher (Hunter Gilmore), newly hired, is charged with keeping stealthy patrons from sneaking up to the closed balcony for illicit purposes. We hear snippets of a Hollywood romance screening in the auditorium whenever the door is opened, and while the young usher and his older colleague (Thomas Jay Ryan) are drawn to it, a young woman (Carrie Specksgoor) manages to sneak up the stairs. When the manager (John Joseph Gallagher) detects the intrusion, the unpleasant, mean-spirited (and possibly dirty old) man berates the ushers. The older one, who is leaving for an adult job, declares that he “came into this place clean” but is “going out dirty” and, peeling off his uniform, ascends the stairs himself. Police retrieve him, but the first girl’s friend (Janet Patton) entices the teen up to the balcony. For Williams, the movies and their whole milieu—the films, the stars, the theaters, the employees—are both a source of romance, intrigue, fantasy, and delight—and of danger, experience, and rebellion. (I am reminded that Nancy Tischler's '61 book about Williams, the first real study of his work, was called Rebellious Puritan because Williams always used to say that his family background encompassed both the Puritan spirit—he was descended from a saint—and that of the Cavalier. This dual imagery often figures in his symbolism. All this is way too heavy for Stairs, of course, but nonetheless . . . .) However sweet, Stairs is hardly revelatory and the cast, though perfectly credible, are never required to take the characters beyond their one-dimensional foundations.

Escape (1930’s) is unmistakably a Glass Menagerie precursor in that it prefigures the relationship between Tom and Amanda. Suggesting that this is more than a coincidental treatment of the same theme is the fact that the ‘escape’ of the title refers, along with the sense of getting away, to the fire escape outside the family’s city apartment. We remember that Tom is discovered on the fire escape of the Wingfield apartment when Menagerie opens and that fire escapes figure symbolically in that play. In Escape, the son, Donald Fenway, wonders if anyone understands that some people yearn to “escape from anything except fire.” Mrs. Fenway, played with adamant lassitude by a virtually unrecognizable Joan van Ark, is fluttery and obsessive about her son’s behavior and future, but she has some reason to be: Donald is brooding and morose, clearly suffocating and depressed. The mother and son (Cameron Folmar) are vacationing in a shore cottage—the musician father and husband is playing the summer concert season—and Donald gazes ceaselessly out the large windows of the sun porch towards the lake. (There is almost no furniture on this glassed-in porch: just Mrs. Fenway’s wicker chaise, a small table upstage, and a pair of wicker chairs with a table between them; the most prominent element of Andrew Jackness’s set is the wing-to-wing expanse of window across the back, looking out at the lake.) I do not know if it was obvious to everyone that suicide is on Donald’s mind from the very beginning, or if it was only because I was reminded that Williams’s literary hero Hart Crane drowned himself in an act with which Williams was preoccupied. (He even left instructions, which were ignored, that his body should be buried at sea near where Crane is believed to have drowned. The title Summer and Smoke is a line from a Crane poem.) Donald also obsesses about time: as Mrs. Fenway says, “Time is one thing that nobody ever gets away from.” (The original title of the one-act version of Sweet Bird was The Enemy: Time, an expression of Williams's feeling about the passage of time and the inevitable decay that comes with age.) While Mrs. Fenway reclines in her chaise as if she is unable to get up, Donald goes out to swim. When he does not return to shore—the maid watches out the window, reporting to Mrs. Fenway—we understand that he has swum out to his death. Escape, for all its obviousness as an apprentice effort, has the hallmarks of the plays from Williams’s most successful period and was well played by the trio (which included Kathleen Chalfant as an Irish maid so ancient she can barely cross the porch).

The only two-parter on the bill, And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens . . . (1960’s) is also Williams’s only play to feature an actual drag queen. Candy Delaney (the extraordinarily versatile Folmar again) is almost 35 and her “husband” has just left her. The décor of Candy’s French Quarter apartment is faux-Japanese and she has a penchant for both kimonos and 1940’s Hollywood attire in the mode of Lauren Bacall or Katherine Hepburn (delightfully designed by Catherine Zuber). In her loneliness and desperation—she declares that she has a “damaged heart”—she picks up rough straight men, and this time she has brought home Karl, a merchant sailor, and invites him to live with her. Over the weeks of their relationship, Karl (Myk Watford) becomes increasingly violent, finally beating Candy ferociously. The young gay couple upstairs finds her, and while the play closes on the trio together on Candy’s couch, they essentially joke about her near-fatal encounter as one rescuer quips, “Now let us sit upon a rumpled bed and tell sad stories of the deaths of queens.” Though Candy may be a take on Alma Winemiller or Blanche DuBois and Karl is surely an avatar of Stanley Kowalski, Williams confronts an aspect of gay life directly here so that Sad Stories, the only Williams play (according to his own declaration) that openly treats gay themes, does not line up directly with anything else he wrote. Of course, the themes of alienation and loneliness—which embrace Karl as well as Candy—are the central focus of Sad Stories as they are of all Williams’s plays and Folmar and Watford, though their relationship is predictable, create characters who are both believable and poignantly sympathetic. It is a mark of both Williams’s writing as well as Kahn’s directing and Watford’s acting that Karl, too, is someone with whom we empathize for, with all his homophobic brutality, he is as lost and needy as Candy.

The similarity of the name Candy Delaney with that of a real-life drag performer whom Williams knew is striking—Candy Darling. (It is further coincidental that Candy Delaney likes to prepare a special drink of absinthe and vodka which she calls a "violet." Violet is the name of the character Candy Darling played in Small Craft Warnings.) The problem occurs because the press materials date Sad Stories as having been composed in the '60s, before Williams did SCW and appeared on stage with Candy Darling. That makes all this quite an amazing coincidence, unless the date of the play is incorrect (which I suspect) or Williams knew Candy Darling years before he wrote—much less performed in—SCW. (Or Williams reworked Sad Stories after he met Candy Darling in SCW in '72.) I wrote to a Williams authority I know to ask if he knew anything bearing on this coincidence, but he didn't know anything for sure—though he suspected that Williams knew Darling earlier.

The most different in the program from Williams’s other known pieces, The Municipal Abattoir (late 1960’s-early 1970’s), the first piece after the intermission, is set in a totalitarian (and apparently Latin American—though that may have been Kahn’s contribution) country with overtones of 1984. The set, representing a city street, consists entirely of an up-stage wall with huge posters of a military officer inscribed with the single word “Viva.” A young man carrying a banner (Folmar) is on his way to a rally and his girlfriend (Specksgoor) pleads with him not to go. It becomes clear that he plans to assassinate the dictator and he sends the girl away. Before he can get on with his task, however, a man approaches to ask directions to the municipal abattoir. The boy pretends not to understand, suspecting an agent provocateur is trying to entrap him. It soon becomes evident, however, that the man (Ryan) is just a hapless clerk and he explains that he must report to the municipal abattoir: If you are late, he explains, it goes harder on you. Though no one spells it out, we understand that the municipal abattoir is the regime’s killing ground for political undesirables. (Here an element of an old Star Trek episode comes to mind: “A Taste of Armageddon” from 1967.) The boy tries to convince the man to resist his own death sentence, but the clerk, played with deadpan simplemindedness, has been so conditioned that he sees only that he must comply. Finally, the boy seems to persuade the clerk to take the banner and gun and perform the boy’s act of defiance before reporting to the municipal abattoir. After the boy leaves, however, the old man turns and asks another, unseen passerby for directions to the municipal abattoir—and the play ends. There is nothing subtle in Abattoir, but it is interesting that it so unmistakably takes as its models Absurdists like Eugène Ionesco—or maybe Vaclav Havel, just becoming known in the mid-1960s—and non-realistic polemicists like Brecht. There are no Brechtian devices on display, but his stamp seems all over the little play. If Sad Stories is Williams’s only openly gay play, Abattoir may be his most openly political one. (The Writer introduced this play by insisting, “Artist is synonymous with revolutionary.”)

The last play on the bill was I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow (first published in 1966), which, aside from the television airing, premiered on stage at the 1971 Maine Theater Arts Festival in Bar Harbor. (It has had several other stagings over the years—I saw it Off-Off-Broadway in 1975 and it has haunted me ever since—including, as noted, Kahn’s Acting Company production.) It is also the most substantial piece of theater in the program, denser and more thoughtful, less obvious and superficial. Also bearing the influence of the Absurdists, mostly Ionesco and, to my ear, Pinter (with undertones of Japanese Noh in Williams’s construction of the dialogue), Tomorrow deals with fear, aging, pain, and failure. A middle-aged woman and man (Chalfant and Ryan as simply One and Two, respectively) are in the living room of her home—she has let him in because he has no place else to go—where they have an elliptical conversation about fear and death. He is a teacher but has not met his classes in days because he can no longer talk to anyone but her. He lives in a seedy hotel—she calls it a “mortuary of a hotel”—where derelict women haunt the lobby; she will not go out—or allow anyone in except him. Both One and Two seldom complete a sentence, but there is a visceral connection between them that is not verbally expressed. (The Pinteresque aspects of Tomorrow reside in the silences at the ends of the uncompleted sentences and the ambiguous nature of the pair’s relationship and the circumstances of the “backstory.”) Even the setting is minimal: a fragmentary room—there are no walls in Jackness’s set—with a sofa and end table at one side, a card table and two chairs in the center, and a staircase at the left. There is another chair on the landing midway up the staircase for the woman has trouble—she is in unspecified pain but the condition is also psychological and emotional—going all the way up the stairs. We glean the theme of the play from bits of the dialogue (if you can really call it that) as the pair are reduced to writing down their thoughts: “I love you and I am afraid,” writes Two, and One offers, “Time . . . is sweeping us out of the way.” Kahn called Tomorrow a masterpiece; I do not know about that, but it is a gem. The “facts” of the story are mysterious (à la Pinter), but the struggle of the two is palpable even if we cannot describe what they are going through. Like the connection between One and Two, the connection between them and us is visceral. (An acting teacher of mine explained that one particular technique makes the audience sense that the character is “up to something” even if they do not know what that is. Tomorrow is like that—it is up to something, even if we cannot articulate it.) The acting was superb here—given especially that Chalfant and Ryan had to develop an intuitive connection to each other (or superlative technical mastery) much like the characters’. That's also Pinteresque, I think.

Taken together, the five plays are a fascinating tour of Williams terrain. In Tomorrow, One describes not only the world of that play but the universe of Five by Tenn: it is a “country of pain, . . . an uninhabitable country which is inhabited, though,” by people who are entirely alone.

[Not all of the previously unproduced plays are still unpublished. And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens . . . appears in Political Stages: Plays That Shaped a Century (edited by Emily Mann and David Roessel; Applause Theatre Books, 2002). Kahn also presented a reading of the play (along with Escape) at the Shakespeare Theatre as part of its ReDiscovery Series on 10 December 2001. Years later, These Are The Stairs You Got to Watch, Escape, And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens, and The Municipal Abattoir were published in Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays (edited by Nicholas Moschovakis and David Roessel; New Directions, 2005). (I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow, the only other play in the program to have been published before Five by Tenn, is available in Dragon Country [New Directions, 1970]. Of the Pace Drama bill, The Pink Bedroom is in Mr. Paradise and The Remarkable Rooming-house appears in The Traveling Companion and Other Plays [edited by Annette J. Saddik; New Directions, 2008].)

[By coincidence, Food For Thought presented Williams's Pinteresque I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow on 24 February at the Paley Center for the Media with a cast of Penny Fuller and Tony Roberts as One and Two.

[The one-acts presented by the Kennedy Center under the title Five by Tenn were revived by the Manhattan Theatre Club that fall with a slightly different bill than the one staged in Washington. Two pays were dropped and two different ones substituted: These Are the Stairs You Got to Watch and The Municipal Abattoir weren’t restaged and, in their stead, The Fat Man's Wife and Adam and Eve on a Ferry (both world premières) were added. Also, the play called Escape was presented under a different title, Summer at the Lake (New York première). (Apparently that was Kahn's idea—he thought it was closer to what Williams would have called it.) The dates of the production were 19 October through 19 December 2004; the cast was substantially the same as Washington, with the major exception of Joan van Ark.]