Orpheus Descending

On Saturday - prior to the icewine extravaganza we saw a production of Tennessee Williams' play Orpheus Descending. In 2005 the play was produced at the Stratford festival and received rave reviews. This production brought back all of the same actors, the director, the producer but a much larger stage in a huge theatre. I wondered how the play would adjust to the significant stage change - the answer was quite well.

I find that Williams is never an easy playwright to watch. So many of the characters are so flawed that I find myself wondering "can anyone really be like this?" I am not a person who likes a lovely, happy ending at the end of every play but in a play by Williams' I don't think anyone is even remotely happy. This play would fit in perfectly with one of the great tragedies by Shakespeare.

This is a tale of a lewd vagrant, a bought woman and a stud for hire all told in a wild and unpredictable melodrama of the American South. It is a gritty play with its themes of racism, addiction, murder, and mayhem. Even though it seems so exaggerated one is left thinking that there may still be places like this in the deep south.

The director, Miles Potter, works a new kind of magic into the heart of the play: the indefinable hold that each of the central three characters has on the other. Lady Torrance (Seana McKenna) runs her dying husband's dry-good store. She's the daughter of an Italian immigrant who was burnt alive for selling liquor to a black man. In walks Valentine Xavier (Jonathan Goad), a guitar-strumming stranger whose impact is best described by Williams himself as creating a "commotion of a fox in a chicken coop." Carol Cutrere (Dana Green) is the rich spoiled girl and self-confessed exhibitionist (like a Paris Hilton but with a moral centre), who seeks salvation from a world of corruption; in the free-spirited Valentine

McKenna depicts the nuances of the racial angst of her Italian character, thereby hinting at injustices that transcend the ones inflicted on her family. Her Lady burns with passion but has a wickedly wry sense of humour. Goad, on the other hand, allows the mercurial nature of Valentine to come to the surface with less apology and more swagger. He's a more rebellious and dangerous figure than ever before. Together, they've found more of what connects their characters in a world that succeeds in setting them apart -- and tragically so. A scene where the two share a bottle of Coke at the store beautifully underlines the moral complexity of their situation: illicit and natural.

When the play appeared in 1957, Williams wrote, "[o]n the surface it was and still is the tale of a wild-spirited boy who wanders into a conventional community of the South and creates the commotion of a fox in a chicken coop. But beneath that now familiar surface it is a play about unanswered questions that haunt the hearts of people and the difference between continuing to ask them...and the acceptance of prescribed answers that are not answers at all."

The play is a retelling of the ancient Greek Orpheus legend in modern clothes and deals, in the most elemental fashion, with the power of passion, art, and imagination to redeem and revitalize life, giving it new meaning. The story is set in a dry goods store in a small southern town marked, in the play, by conformity, sexual frustration, narrowness, and racism. Into this scene steps Val, a young man with a guitar, a snakeskin jacket, a questionable past, and undeniable animal-erotic energy and appeal. He gets a job in the dry goods store run by a middle-aged woman named Lady, whose elderly husband is dying. Lady has a past and passions of her own. She finds herself attracted to Val and to the possibility of new life he seems to offer. It is a tempting antidote to her loveless marriage and boring, small-town life. The play describes the awakening of passion, love, and life -- as well as its tragic consequences for Val and Lady.

The play deals with passion, its repression and its attempted recovery. On another level, it is also about trying to live bravely and honestly in a fallen world. The play is replete with lush, poetic dialog and imagery. On the stage, the opening sections seem somewhat lacking in dramatic movement, but the play picks up power as the characters are developed and it moves to its climax. Val, representing Orpheus, represents the forces of energy and eros, which, buried as they are in compromise and everyday mundanity, have the tragic power to create life anew.

The play is on-stage at the Royal Alexander Theatre until February 11th.