bow down and be dim
by Douglas Messerli
Tennessee Williams Vieux Carré, conceived and performed by
The Wooster Group / the performance I saw was on Sunday, December 5, 2010 at
Redcat (The Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater in The Walt Disney Concert Hall
Complex) Los Angeles
Although Tennessee Williams began
writing his play Vieux Carré in 1938,
the play did not appear on Broadway until 1977, and then lasted only 5
performances. The New York Times critic Clive Barnes summarized: " It is a
play of blatant melodrama and crepuscular atmosphere," but admitted that
that might be said of any Williams play. "You leave the theater with the
impression of having been told a secret," he concluded.
The Wooster Group's reconstructed performance of this unknown work
leaves one, strangely enough, with the same feeling, that Williams is revealing
something here that no matter how you reimagine its structure remains potent.
If his autobiographically-tinted The
Glass Menagerie only hints at personal realities, the next step of his
life—Williams’ emergence into the dark world of New Orleans' French Quarter—is
revealed with an almost horrific honesty that can only make one, at times, want
to look away.
If "Rise and Shine" was the daily aspiration in that earlier
play (at least for Amanda Wingfield), The Writer of Vieux Carré seems to live a life in the shadow of his mother's
proclamation, in a world ruled by a declaration to "Bow Dow and Be
Dim." From the beginning of the play, all the characters except The Writer
(Ari Fliakos) have learned how to crawl. The metal-like cages of the Wooster
production which signify the rooms of Mrs. Wire's (Kate Valk) boarding house
for the destitute are strewn with clothing and personal belongings as if the
inhabitants spent most of their lives on the floor or in bed. In fact, they do
precisely that.
In what I now perceive as a brilliant directorial decision, Elizabeth
LeCompte cast two of the characters as their polar opposites. Kate Valk, the
dreadful Mrs. Wire, also plays another of The Writer's acquaintances in this
zoo of lost lives, Jane Sparks, a seemingly normal young woman who has somehow
lost her way, becoming trapped in a life given over to sex. The object of her
desire is a seedy hick who works at the local strip bar, Tye McCool (also Scott
Shepherd), who is anything but "cool," but like Nightingale goes
about with a hard-on most of time and sees himself as a kind of heterosexual
Priapus who won't "let a fag blow him for less than a $100." Both
Nightingale and The Writer desire him, despite their recognition that he is a
burned-out heroin addict. In the lonely world in which they exist, nearly
anyone will do in a pinch.
Although both Nightingale and McCool are sexually consumed, however,
neither can be said to be, like the Roman God they bow to, generative. And
their lovemaking ends, generally, in disgust.
It is a disgusting world in which they live. McCool excuses his most
recent heroin episode on his knowledge that his boss has turned his dogs upon
the bar's "Champagne girl," the lead stripper, when she threatened to
leave him. The dogs literally "ate" her, he reports—reminding us
somewhat of the dreadful fate of Sebastian Venerable in Suddenly Last Summer. All of the figures of this play are, in one
way or another, being eaten up, consumed. Jane, it turns out, has a serious
blood disease and will soon die. By play's end Nightingale is so sick,
symbolized by the loss of his erect penis, that is he taken away to a public
institution to die. McCool, we recognize, is so caught up in a world of crime
and drugs that it can't be long before he too "will go to Spain," as
the underworld figures describe their colleague's sudden disappearance.
Beginning his tenure as a true innocent, The Writer has quickly gotten
involved with Mrs. Wire's attempts to open a restaurant in her room, and is
forced to testify that she is innocent (even though he has seen her do it) in
trying to burn the photographer living below her with hot water. After an
operation for an eye cataract, he can, symbolically speaking, no longer see the
truth. By the second act of this work The Writer has become one with the
destroyed beings who surround him, raping Nightingale and attempting to
sexually attack the drunken McCool.
For a few moments it seems like The Writer may escape this nightmarish
society, as he meets a young man, Sky, who, about to head West for a new life,
asks him to join in the voyage. But we soon discover that it is impossible.
Just as Nightingale and McCool have been symbolized by their erect members, so
is The Writer tied to his headphones, keyboard, and video screen as he attempts
to tell his story as quickly as it is being told to him, or, as he tells the
story to its characters as quickly as they might enact it. There is little
difference; either way, we see that he is clearly frozen in space; Sky does not
show up to save him from himself. At play's end, The Writer is strangely at
peace with the silence surrounding the disappearance of the others with whom he
has shared his life or created.
In short, The Writer, it appears, is now as corrupt and uncaring as the
people he met when he first arrived in Vieux Carré, and in the process has been
swept up into the evil world of his own imagination. If nothing else, the man we
see now welcoming the quietude is the polar opposite of the boy at the
beginning of the play crying out of loneliness in his room.
Los Angeles, December 10, 2010
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera and Performance (December 2010).
