left in the lurch
by Douglas Messerli
Tennessee Williams (screenplay [not
credited properly to Elia Kazan], adapted by Pierre Laville and Emily Mann) Baby Doll / Los Angeles, The Fountain
Theatre, directed by Simon Levy / the production I saw was on Sunday, September
11, 2016
Since Elia Kazan’s 1956 film Baby Doll was based on Tennessee
Williams’ early short play, 27 Wagons
Full of Cotton, and Williams, himself, later rewrote the play as Tiger Tail, it is difficult to know why
Pierre Laville and Emily Mann determined to “re-adapt” the version of the play,
named after the movie, I saw the other day at Los Angeles’ Fountain Theatre.
Perhaps
It is perhaps patently unfair to compare the acting abilities of the
film foursome—Karl Malden, Carol Baker, Eli Wallach, and Mildred Dunnock—with
the younger and far less experienced cast of John Prosky, Lindsay LaVanchy,
Daniel Bess, and Karen Kondazian. Although Baker was the least talented of the
film cast, she was perfect for the pouting child-bride of the Southern
plantation bigot, Archie Lee Meighan. Wallach almost literally steamed-up the
screen in his first film appearance back in 1956, and the always solid Malden
played his character with near perfection, with Dunnock providing the daffy
eccentricity of Aunt Rose Comfort.
The Fountain Theatre actors try valiantly to recreate these roles, and,
at moments, they almost succeed, particularly Prosky—whose actor father I had
seen several times on Washington, D. C. Arena stage—who almost captures the
sweaty leftover of a once significant land-owner devoted to ginning the cotton
of his neighbors. His final violent outrage against the new world in which his
good-old-boy tactics are no longer rewarded, is particularly well-performed and
almost terrifyingly touching, particularly when he suddenly realizes that his
former “associates” are now intending to arrest and try him for his
“irrational” behavior.
Bess (as Silva Vaccaro) does his handsome best to carry out the
“tit-for-tat” values hinted at by Archie, as he attempts to seduce Archie’s
teenage bride, who, by marriage agreement, is finally to have sex with her
husband, after two years of chastity, in two days. But, despite his truly sexy
torso and hips, as well as the script’s playful S&M complications wherein
he gently and sometimes not-so-gently toys with her while holding a small whip,
his acting simply doesn’t add up to the dark and far more horrifying games of
hide-and-seek played by the film’s characters as they run through the decaying
mansion’s empty rooms (Archie has just seen the furniture company repossess
nearly every object in them for lack of payment). At moments Bess seems as sexually
naïve and even disinterested as his inexperienced target; and we have to
wonder, at times, whether or not he’s really more interested in her signature
admitting Archie’s guilt in burning down his character’s competing gin-mill than
in capturing her girlish body.
Of course, that’s a question the Kazan film itself asks. But here,
Lavanchy’s Baby Doll seems far less ready and raunchy than Baker ever did. We
know Baker, although playing hard to get, was perfectly ready to undergo the
sexual act with her would-be rapist; but Lavanchy, seemingly a bit older than
Baker’s version, seems far more confused and confusing, particularly since
Lavanchy, alas, seems in the early scenes to be of the “holler” school of
acting. I may be losing my hearing a bit, but the high loud pitch of her anger
over Archie’s clumsy attempts at love-making came through as too much of a
screech, making it far too obvious that she no longer is the teenage “baby” she
pretends to be. And after those early scenes it becomes difficult for Lavanchy
to return to the innocent child in her scenes with Bess.
Kondazian certainly revealed Aunt Rose Comfort as an eccentric human
being, but she seemed so crazed at moments that it was simply hard to believe
her. Was her passion for chocolates, stolen from dying folks at the near-by
state hospital, in the film? I certainly don’t recall it.
I do recall the remarkable collard-greens scene, in which the Sicilian
immigrant Vacarro and Baby Doll praise the delights of the “pot licker” of Aunt
Rose’s uncooked greens simply in order to taunt the angry Archie. As I remember
it they both simply slopped up their faces with the awful stuff while turning
the act of eating, as in the famous scene in the movie Tom Jones, into a surrogate of sex. On this stage the entire scene
appeared more as a pallid attempt to simply to get the older man’s goat.
Of course, we can’t get the close-ups of a camera, and we haven’t the
space to see the couple run through the entire estate, locking themselves away
in rooms just in order to dare the other to enter. These actors have only a
front porch with a swing and fresh-water well, a small dining room and a tiny
bedroom to play out their epic dance. And at moments at the well, on that
swing, and in the tiny crib of a bed, this dramatic version really does reveal
a kind of steamy and tender love.
We never know, in either the film or the stage production, whether or
not Vaccaro will return the next day to collect his prize of the young girl and
her aunt. Like so many of Williams’ heroines, they are left in the lurch. But
after seeing this version I had far more doubts that he might even want to come
back.
Los Angeles, September 12, 2016
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (September 2016).
