Kristen Vaughan as Zelda Fitzgerald and Peter J. Crosby as F. Scott Fitzgerald
in a scene from Clothes for a Summer Hotel
(Photo credit: Joe Bly)
Tennessee Williams’ Clothes for a Summer Hotel about Jazz Age legends F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, which was a quick failure on Broadway in 1980, has not been seen locally since 1995. The White Hotel Theater Company revival, only the second since its premiere, is an ambitious attempt to resuscitate the reputation of Williams’ last Broadway play. Unfortunately, the very literal production by Cyndy A. Marion fails to overcome the play’s shortcomings. There is nothing very wrong with the acting company of 12 (playing 18 roles), but the play remains unsatisfying.
Williams subtitled his drama “a ghost play.” What he meant was that this biographical tragedy goes backwards and forwards in time with the characters speaking of future events in their lives of which they could not have known. Starting in 1947, Scott Fitzgerald visits his wife Zelda on the grounds of Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina, the scene of her last confinement in a mental asylum. Fitzgerald has flown directly from Hollywood, California, and arrived in clothes suitable for a summer hotel. The play then travels back in time to 1926 when the Fitzgeralds were living on the French Riviera and already much estranged. In chronologically time, Fitzgerald died in 1941 and in the play, Zelda refers to the fire at Highland in which she died in 1948.
Had the play been presented as “a dream play” like that of August Strindberg with characters appearing and disappearing in undefined territory, it might have been an extremely theatrical experience. Unfortunately, except for the characters’ foreknowledge of events to come (Ernest Hemingway predicts his suicide in his 60’s), the play is quite literal in its presentation. However, all of the information offered comes directly out of the standard biographies and Williams’ text has nothing new to offer. On the other hand, the number of literary and biographical allusions may make it difficult for anyone to follow who is not versed in the Fitzgeralds’ tempestuous lives.
Did Zelda’s demands drive Scott to drinking which destroyed his career? Did he stand in the way of Zelda’s own creativity? Did Scott steal material from his wife’s writing? Did Zelda’s sexual betrayal destroy their marriage? All of these questions have been answered much better in the standard biographies. Williams avoids the question of whether Zelda was mentally ill even before her marriage to Scott, and the most recent medical belief that Scott was hypoglycemic and drank to restore his sugar imbalance.
The characterizations remain the same throughout the play even though two decades go by. Neither Scott nor Zelda seem to gain any knowledge from their encounters or the flashbacks into their earlier life together. In a Riviera party sequence at the Gerald Murphys, Ernest Hemingway tells his host, “Zelda’s a crazy and Scott’s a rummy,” which neatly sums up the entire play. Scott drinks because Zelda won’t let him write, and Zelda is unfaithful because Scott doesn’t have time for her due to his writing, a vicious circle with no end except the separation to come. The dilemma was that the Fitzgeralds couldn’t live together, but they couldn’t live without each other.
In his notebooks, Fitzgerald wrote, “There are no second acts in American lives,” and the play which is about the second half of the Fitzgeralds’ lives proves it. The play starts with both Zelda and Scott in decline which isn’t very interesting as the play doesn’t tell us what brought them together or what they have lost. Even in the flashbacks, they are past their prime, emotionally alienated, and already on the verge of their future breakup. Neither Scott nor Zelda has a very good time in Clothes for a Summer Hotel and neither does the audience. Marion’s direction is at times sluggish, artificially leaving too much time between lines, rather than creating natural speech. Williams’ famous poetic ear is not at his best here so that it is not necessary to let the lines linger.
It is easy to see why Williams was attracted to the material: as portrayed by Kristen Vaughan, Zelda, the archetypal southern belle, is a blood sister to Blanche Du Bois. At times, she sounds exactly like Blanche before we meet her in A Streetcar Named Desire, when she is still the belle of the ball. Peter J. Crosby’s Scott simply becomes an alcoholic appendage to his promiscuous and flamboyant wife. We never see Scott’s talent, just his suffering and his decline. Williams’ focus is centered on Zelda but a Zelda after the fall, never revealing why Scott was ever attracted to her in the first place.
The scenes between Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway are almost embarrassing and it is hard to believe that Hemingway was so pompous and pretentious. Ironically, Rod Schweitzer looks a good deal like Hemingway in the nineteen-twenties, but can’t help the lines he has been given. Montgomery Sutton is much more successful as Edouard, the French flyer that Zelda took as a lover on the Riviera, but the exchanges between them which resemble the bedroom scene in Sweet Bird of Youth is not very revealing. Fitzgerald did a better job of depicting him in his novel, Tender is the Night, which includes a semi-fictional version of the couple’s life on the Riviera.
As British actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Mary Goggin steals most of the scenes she in, but she ought to played as much older. Mrs. Pat was actually 62 in 1926 which is the era Williams is depicting. Tom Cleary and Lisa Riegel as the wealthy expatriate party-givers Gerald and Sara Murphy are simply used as bystanders who comment on the action and have no real role in the drama. The other actors play doctors, nurses, nuns at the hospital, or participants at the Murphy party.
John C. Scheffler’s abstract setting, with additional set design by Randall Parsons, of the gated Highland Hospital on the hill is quite effective, but the only elements that are used in the staging are the realistic props (bench, desk, bed) that are placed in front of it. The lighting by Debra Leigh Siegel is more effective in creating mood, casting pink and red shadows that could be references to the setting sun or the fire that consumed Zelda, and the original piano theme by Joe Gianono is also quite haunting. The sound design by David Schulder makes excellent use of the wind on the hill. Adam Coffia’s costumes for Zelda make it clear she is unstable, while the rest evocatively take us back to the Jazz Age.
Clothes for a Summer Hotel is Tennessee Williams applying his own imagination to a biographical story, which makes it unique in his portraits of Southern women. This rare revival by the White Horse Theater Company allows for a look at a missing piece of the Williams canon. However, it will take a more astute production to overcome the play’s tarnished reputation.
Clothes for a Summer Hotel (through February 21)
White Horse Theater Company at the Hudson Guild Theatre, 441 W. 26th Street, in Manhattan
For tickets, call 212-868-4444 or http://www.smarttix.com