| . | 06/04/2009
Vieux Carre
By: Deirdre Donovan
Vieux Carré stars George Morfogen and Sean McNall
photo by Gregory Costanzo
Tennessee Williams’ autobiographical play Vieux Carre is enjoying a robust revival by the Pearl Theatre Company. The drama is a virtual compendium of his earlier works. Playgoers can listen to strong echoes of Streetcar Named Desire, Suddenly Last Summer, and Camino Real. Its loose episodic structure can be off-putting at times, but as a memory play it surely holds its own.
The setting is a cheap rooming house in the Garden District of New Orleans. The time is just before World War II. We meet Mrs. Wire (Carol Schultz), the harridan who rules the boarding house at 722 Toulouse Street (Williams once lived at the same address) with an iron fist. There are 6 indigent tenants living under her roof: The Writer (Sean McNall), a stand-in for the young Williams; Nightingale (George Morforgen), an elderly gay painter who drinks and has tuberculosis; Nursie (Claudia Robinson), a strongminded black servant at the rooming house; Jane (Rachel Botchan), a rather decent young woman who lives with Tye; Tye (Joseph Collins), a gigolo who works in a local dive; Mary Maude (Beth Dixon), an elderly woman who’s as faded as the rooming house itself; Miss Carrie (Pamela Payton-Wright), her elderly friend.
Helmed by the excellent Austin Pendleton, the play speaks on its own terms. It takes its sources from William’s life, and every whiff of life that blows across the stage smells authentic. We see the central character, The Writer, concurrently evolving as a writer and defining his sexual disposition. He’s taking refuge at the boarding house following his beloved grandmother’s death as well as fleeing his St. Louis roots. He meets the gay painter Nightingale, and soon realizes that he’s not in St. Louis anymore, and that “coming out” is in. Just as spicy is the heterosexual relationship between the young Jane and Tye. The class contrasts between the cultured Jane and the animalistic Tye creates tension of all sorts. But the real zinger comes when Tye tells Jane that the go-go dancer at his nightclub was eaten by wolfish dogs. No doubt this play is not for the faint of heart. Cannibalistic themes arise, and mental illness hovers in the air. In fact, in one bizarre episode in Act 2, Mrs. Wire, who has a maternal side, hallucinates that The Writer is her lost son, and sings a nursery song to him.
Harry Feiner’s set design is realistic and poetic at once. It evokes the jazzy and dream-like atmosphere of New Orleans, but the seedy décor of the rooming house never lets you forget for a moment that its denizens are dirt poor.
The goings-on in Vieux Carre are narrated by The Writer. And he records them in a past and present time scale (similar to A Glass Menagerie), which gives a wonderful multi-layered texture to the story. Williams seems to use The Writer here as a vehicle for tapping into the storehouses of his complex, creative personality. And it’s quite fascinating--and revealing--to watch this effigy of the young Williams grapple with his painful surroundings.
The acting is impressive. Sean McNall turns in a particularly fine performance as The Writer. McNall seems to have a real forte for inhabiting scribes. A few seasons back he played the late critic Kenneth Tynan in Orson’s Shadow, a role that brought him a well-deserved Obie Award. Other standouts in the cast are Carol Schultz as Mrs. Wire, and George Morfogen as Nightingale.
The Pearl Theatre has been a breeding ground for reviving classical plays for the past 25 years. With this last show of their season, they take a seldom-produced work of Williams and make it a stage worthy event. In Pendleton’s capable hands, Vieux Carre is not merely a sordid tale about a group of outcasts in New Orleans. Rather it is a house of catastrophe that has an aura of redemption in some rooms. Although it is lushly overwritten in some scenes, it has compelling characters and genuine sexual honesty.
At 80 St. Mark’s Place at 1st Avenue.
Tickets are $45 and $55, call 212-598-9802
Through June 14.
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