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Orpheus Descending

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Tennessee Williams (1911 -- 1983) currently is getting a great deal of attention in Washington, D.C. The Kennedy Center is presenting three of his major dramas performed by marquis stars. The Washington Opera is presenting an operatic version of "A Streetcar Named Desire" with music by Andre Previn. But another Washington theatre, the Arena Stage, is taking a more adventurous approach. It is reviving Williams's little-known work "Orpheus Descending". It was my good fortune to see this production. It lead me to read the play and to think about it, about Tennessee Williams, and about passionate and romantic theatre.

Orpheus Descending was first presented on Broadway in 1957 where it enjoyed a brief run and only modest success. The play is a rewrite of an early Williams effort, "Battle of Angels" which was written in 1940 and poorly received. Williams was attached to Orpheus and to the effort it cost him. When the play appeared in 1957, he wrote that "[o]n the surface it was and still is the tale of a wild-spirited boy who wanders into a conventional community of the South and creates the commotion of a fox in a chicken coop. But beneath that now familiar surface it is a play about unanswered questions that haunt the hearts of people and the difference between continuing to ask them, ... and the acceptance of prescribed answers that are not answers at all."

The play is a retelling of the Orpheus legend and deals, in the most elemental fashion, with the power of passion, art, and imagination to redeem life and return it to meaning. The story is set in a dry goods store in a small southern town marked, in the play, by conformity, sexual frustration, narrowness,and racism. Into the scene steps Val, a young man with a guitar,a snakeskin jacket, a past and undeniable animal and erotic energy and appeal. He gets a job in the dry goods store run by a middle-aged woman named Lady whose elderly husband is dying. Lady has a past and passions of her own and she is attracted to Val and to life as an antidote to her loveless marriage. The play describes the awakening of passion, love, and life -- and its tragic consequences for Val and Lady.

The play deals with passion, its repression and its attempted recovery. For Williams, I think it is about trying to live bravely and honsetly in a fallen world. The play is replete with lush, poetic dialogue and imagery. On the stage, the production seems in the opening sections somewhat lacking in dramatic movement, but it picks up power as the characters are developed and the play moves to its climax. Val as Orpheus, represents the force of energy and eros which buried as they are in compromise and in humdrum everydayness have the tragic power to make life anew.

I felt lucky to have the opportunity to see this play. It shows, I think, how much remains to be explored in the world of art when we look just a bit below the surface. Those not in a position to see the play themselves will still have the joy of discovery in reading this obscure work by a great romantic American dramatist and poet.

This is my favorite Williams play by far, simply due to the complicated and dark nature of the whole thing. Truly brilliant, with comedy, passion, and chock-full of social commentary.

The first couple of paragraphs here have been used as introduction to other plays written by Tennessee Williams and reviewed in this space.

Perhaps, as is the case with this reviewer, if you have come to the works of the excellent American playwright Tennessee Williams through adaptations of his plays to commercially distributed film you too will have missed some of the more controversial and intriguing aspects of his plays that had placed him at that time along with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller as America's finest serious playwrights. Although some of the films have their own charms I want to address the written plays in this entry first (along with, when appropriate, commentary about Williams' extensive and detailed directing instructions).

That said, there are certain limitations for a political commentator like this reviewer on the works of Williams. Although his plays, at least his best and most well-known ones, take place in the steamy South or its environs, there is virtually no acknowledgement of the race question that dominated Southern life during the period of the plays; and, for that matter was beginning to dominate national life. Thus, although it is possible to pay homage to his work on its artistic merits, I am very, very tentative about giving fulsome praise to that work on its political merits. With that proviso Williams nevertheless has created a very modern stage on which to address social questions at the personal level like homosexuality, incest and the dysfunctional family that only began to get addressed widely well after his ground-breaking work hit the stage.

On reading "Orpheus Descending", Williams' take on the old Greek legend in modern grab I was struck by the similarity in the character of the Orpheus figure, Val ,and Nelson Algren's Dove Linkhorn in " A Walk On The Wild Side. Both are loners, outsiders, have checkered pasts and are ready for anything from deep romantic love to murder and mayhem. And because they are capacity of that range of emotions and reactions they are also as capable of getting burned by a complacent society that does not take kindly to those that it cannot control. Val drifts into town, gets a job at a store by the enigmatic Lady and then the wheels begin to turn and to deal out his fate. Could he have stopped and turned away? Although that is a question that drives many dramatic efforts it is not always resolvable in a play- or in life. Lady's terminally ill husband lurks in the background with nothing to lose, once the romantic sparks start to fly. I do not understand why this play was not more successful in its earlier manifestations as was pointed out in the introduction, especially as this is a culture that has made space, if only grudgingly and symbollically, for the outsider to tempt the fates.

i felt that the book was among the best i've read.

i felt that the book was among the best i've read.