Theater lovers, rejoice: Civic Rep, the island’s newest theater company, is currently offering up a magnificent production of four short plays by an undisputed titan of American theater, Tennessee Williams.
The show, “Dragon Country” includes works that almost certainly haven’t been seen by most islanders, even those who can quote from memory treasured bits of dialogue from “The Glass Menagerie,” “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”
Instead, the production offers plays from Williams’ almost unbearably vast trove of writing that is too little known — a body of work that includes 70 one-act plays, two novels, a raft of short stories, poetry, memoirs and more than a dozen other full-length plays that the critics jeered and audiences ignored.
Perhaps his detractors were blinded by his incandescent output from the 1940s and 50s when he created Blanche DuBois, Stanley Kowalski, Maggie the Cat and Amanda Wingfield. But still, it’s hard, and heartbreaking, that the world so callously rejected so much of the rest of Williams’ oeuvre. But then again, heartbreak was Williams’ wheelhouse, and so he kept writing prolifically until the end of his life in 1983. Beautiful words fell from his mind to the page on an almost daily basis, despite the fact that almost no one cared.
Luckily, Civic Rep, made up of divinely talented local artists, is now in residence at Open Space for Arts & Community, and the works of Williams, both obscure and celebrated, are the focus of the group’s first season. “Dragon Country” will be followed by a production of a Williams’ “The Night of the Iguana,” in September and October. (For Williams obsessives, it will be a good year: Vashon Opera will also present “A Streetcar Named Desire,” with music by Andre Previn, in May.)
The show aims to captivate its audience members from the moment they walk into the Grand Hall of Open Space, which has been transformed into a minimalist yet evocative dreamscape by production designers Kristin Tsiatsios (set), Kwame Braun (video projections), Niclas Olson (lighting), Andy Swan (sound) and Fawn Bartlett (costumes).
Before the plays begin, a duo of expert dancers (Lynelle Sjoberg and Shawn Kellogg) quietly stalk the stage with trance-like movements, hushing the pre-show chatter and alerting the audience that this will be a devotional evening of theater. The dancers, staged by Elizabeth Klob, return to haunt the stage in the intervals between plays as the evening continues.
“Dragon Country” daringly opens with the most challenging play of the night, “I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow,” a late work by Williams. Directed by Civic Rep co-artistic director L. Zane Jones and achingly acted by Maria Glanz and David Mielke, the play is about what might be the final night of a friendship between two broken souls. It’s a quietly devastating and almost abstract play about disappointment, loss and the passage of time — heavy subjects that seemed to leave the audience last Saturday night gasping for air. If you love to be crushed, pinned down and beaten up by art (I do!), this will be your favorite play of the night.
The next play, “The Lady of Larkspur Lotion,” written in 1941, was more lively. In it, two delusional inhabitants of a flea-bag New Orleans hotel (Robin Jones as Mrs. Hardwicke-Moore, a prostitute, and David Mielke, as an unnamed writer) go to battle with the hotel’s unkempt proprietress (Antonia Greene). Michael Barker, who directed, skillfully guided his actors through the often quite funny tempest of its plot, ratcheting up the volume of the play’s drunken, rhetorical genius until its denouement — a giddy toast by the prostitute and writer over their grand triumph in eking out another night in the deplorable flophouse.
Another play, “Something Unspoken,” written in 1958, was directed by Charlotte Tiencken and features Jeanne Dougherty and Robin Jones, playing two people in a relationship that has for decades never really been what it has seemed on the surface. It’s a thrilling testament to Williams’ courage — the play, written in 1958, is clearly about the tragedy of gay women living a closeted life. But the play is also savagely witty, with flights of over-the-top, Southern-inflected dialogue that could have been written by no one else but Tennessee Williams.
“Dragon County” closes with “A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot,” also from 1958. It was directed by Klob and perfectly cast with Tami Brockway Joyce and Janet McAlpin, who make the most of their roles as catty, aging frenemies on the prowl for men in a dive bar in New Orleans. Anthony Winkler also shines here in the small part of a waiter. This play is the biggest audience pleaser, but of course, like everything else Williams ever wrote, it’s about the deep pain and longing inside ordinary people.
And though he was far from being an ordinary man, Williams knew that pain and longing quite well. Perhaps that’s what kept him at his typewriter all those years, relentlessly dissecting the small cruelties, secrets, lies and pathos of the human condition. Perhaps by writing it down, he thought he could cure it.
Don’t miss “Dragon Country.” Its final performances are at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Nov. 16 and 17, and 4 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 18, at Open Space. Tickets, $25 for general admission and $20 for students and seniors, can be purchased at civicrep.org and at the door.
CORRECTION: This version corrects an earlier version of the story that mistakenly said that Civic Rep would present “The Night of the Iguana” in May. The production will occur in September and October. Robin Jones was also misidentified as Robin Moore in reference to her role in “The Lady of Larkspur Lotion.”
