Showing posts with label Tennessee Williams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tennessee Williams. Show all posts

Friday, November 24, 2017

‘Billy and Me’ by Terry Teachout to Premiere at Palm Beach Dramaworks




Tom Wahl and Nicholas Richberg
as William Inge and Tennessee Williams

Those fortunate enough to be in the West Palm Beach area will have a unique theatre opportunity beginning Dec. 8th.  Palm Beach Dramaworks is mounting the world premiere of a play by Terry Teachout, Billy and Me, in which he has imagined a tempestuous friendship between two of our most renowned twentieth century playwrights, Tennessee Williams and William (Billy) Inge.  This is a major step in the maturation of PBD under the creative direction of its Producing Artistic Director, William Hayes.  His vision has been to supplement the company’s acclaimed classics by also producing completely original works from the very beginning through numerous rewrites, collaborations, rehearsals and eventually onto the PBD stage, and even beyond, to New York and as a staple of regional theaters throughout the U.S.

Billy and Me is a memory play narrated by Tennessee Williams.  Act I is set in a gay bar in Chicago on New Year’s Eve, 1944, immediately after a pre-Broadway tryout of Williams’ The Glass Menagerie.    Williams is on the ascent in Act I, but Inge is an unhappy theatre critic as well as miserable in his personal life.  Seeing The Glass Menagerie that night has inspired Inge to try his hand at play writing.  Act II takes place almost 15 years later at Inge's Sutton Place apartment, a few hours after the Broadway premiere of his first flop, A Loss of Roses.  Inge has had years of hits, is at the height of his career (and prosperity), while Williams’ decline was already underway.  Inge is having difficulty reconciling himself to his first flop as well as his closeted sexuality.

William Hayes
According to Hayes, who is directing Billy and Me and was the inspiration for the play, “the genesis of the idea was while I was directing Picnic, doing research, and was reminded that Inge met Tennessee Williams in 1944, and I began to imagine the intricacy of their relationship, about which little is really known. They must have influenced one another, I thought. They shared similar backgrounds, both being from small towns, had complicated relationships with their mothers, fathers who were frequently absent as they were salesmen, and both were gay, Williams acknowledging it, but Inge self loathing.”

So Hayes suggested the idea of a play about the two famous playwrights to Terry Teachout who was in town for pre-production meetings for his play Satchmo at the Waldorf, which was playing at the end of the same season as Picnic at PBD.  Teachout was intrigued.  After meeting with Hayes, he flew home when the idea for the structure of the play came to him in an epiphany.  “I even had the 2nd’ act nailed, so I knew I was on solid ground. I called Bill and said ‘I have it!’ and went back to West Palm to meet with Bill and we both agreed that we saw the project in the same way and knew we would work together well. After making my directing debut at PBD last season, I know very well that it's a great place to work, a gorgeous theatre full of first-class people. I also know that Bill is a superb director.”

Terry Teachout
Then soon after the structure was established, Teachout wrote the play in a three day frenzy.  That was more than a year ago and since then it has been “workshopped” by PBD, undergoing revisions.  As Teachout explained, “workshopping is the modern day replacement for out of town tryouts which used to be the norm.”  These workshops have been tirelessly and inspirationally orchestrated by Hayes.

Teachout fills the threadbare historical record of the two playwrights’ personal relationship guided by his knowledge of the men and their plays.  Thus the play is "a work of fiction freely based on fact."  "It's a play about love, jealousy, and - not to put it too pompously - destiny," said Teachout. "An artist is a person who can't do anything else with his life. Art is his fate: it's that or nothing. But he can't become an artist until he accepts that fate and acknowledges his true nature. That's a big part of what this play is about: the struggle of two great American playwrights to come to terms with who they really were."

I asked him about the difficulties he had in writing the play and he responded “nothing excites an artist more than limitations that must be surmounted and the problem with depicting Inge is how do you warm up to him? How do you make him relatable? But having reviewed more than 1,000 theatrical performances in my career taught me much about how a play works, how you have to make difficult decisions about when action starts and stops.” 

There are three actors in the play.  Two of them have been with the play ever since the first workshop production, Nicholas Richberg who plays Tennessee Williams, and Tom Wahl as William Inge.  Joining those two about half way through the developmental process is veteran PBD actor Cliff Burgess, who plays three roles.

Nicholas Richberg has been involved in several developmental plays, mostly with Zoetic Stage, but he says this experience was “my longest development process, a huge gift to an actor. Terry is the writer, but it allows the actors to contribute and shape it and it’s incredible to see the changes over time.”

Richberg is also an experienced musical performer, appearing in Palm Beach Dramaworks’ 1776 last year, and in several Sondheim productions in the past and thinks of both Sondheim and Williams as geniuses in their genres.  He has no preference playing musical or drama as long as he is “interpreting the words /music of the author.”

He sees his biggest challenge in this play is to capture the characteristics of Tennessee Williams – usually well known to the audience because Williams was clearly gay, and granted numerous interviews, some while he was obviously drunk.  Both he and Wahl worked with a dialogue coach to get their speech patterns right and even so,” these are not impersonations” both opined.  But the real challenge goes beyond that Richberg said: “playing a real person, having the audience truly care about him, and what motivated him.”

His favorite line from the play is “Beauty is truth, truth beauty – start with the truth and then make it beautiful.”  And that sort of captures the essence of Teachout’s writing he says, “Making the language beautiful, almost like music, poetic.”

“My one wish as an actor was to play Tom in The Glass Menagerie, and, finally, with Billy and Me, I am in a memory play about Tennessee Williams: it’s as rewarding for an actor as playing Tom.”

Inge is played by Tom Wahl, making his PBD debut. He said “I like the challenge of playing the lesser known (as a public persona) Inge, as I have a free hand in interpreting. I see Inge in a constant struggle, finding himself, starting his career as an actor, turning to teaching, then becoming a critic, and then a playwright, always seeming to being either in the wrong place or in the wrong skin. And when finally he is true to himself, he is disgusted by it.”

Wahl also loved being involved in the workshop experience since the beginning, allowing him to make contributions and growing into his character, the shy, repressed William Inge.  Wahl said “although perhaps better known for his other plays and movies, my favorite is Dark at the Top of the Stairs, his last major play.”  In addition to his extensive acting experience, Wahl is a versatile voiceover artist and voice actor.

Cliff Burgess
Cliff Burgess has appeared in many PBD productions and although he stepped into the developmental process later than the other two actors, he was able to provide some valuable input “through fresh eyes.”  Also as a fledgling playwright himself “the process allowed me to see the director and the playwright in action.”

He plays three characters in the play, the waiter in Act I, the doctor in Act II, and the stage manager in both acts. What he finds fascinating about each is that they are not tangential “as each character has a purpose and each has an impact on Williams and Inge.  I play characters ‘of the more mundane world, and supply some comic relief too.’”

Interestingly, Burgess has played Tom in The Glass Menagerie twice in his career and in Inge’s Bus Stop, so he is intimately familiar with their works, and “I recognize the suffering of each and their humanity.”

Billy and Me “inspired by the friendship between playwrights Tennessee Williams and William Inge,” is Directed by William Hayes, PBD’s Producing Artistic Director.

The playwright, Terry Teachout, is drama critic for The Wall Street Journal, has had an uncommonly diverse career.  He was a professional jazz bassist for eight years, and has also been a dance and music critic, an editorial writer, and a member of the National Council on the Arts.  He has written the libretti for three operas and is the author of numerous books, including Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong.  His play Satchmo at the Waldorf was written after the Armstrong biography.

Scenic Design is by Victor Becker, Lighting Design by Paul Black, and Costume Design by Brian O'Keefe.  Billy and Me will grace the stage at Palm Beach Dramaworks on Clematis Street, West Palm Beach, from December 8 to the 31st with previews on December 6 and 7.  

UPDATE:  My Review of the play now posted







Saturday, October 15, 2016

The Night of the Iguana at Dramaworks – Tennessee Williams’ Poetic Drama



Dramaworks’ opening season traditionally begins with a challenging masterwork, with a full scale cast, and The Night of the Iguana, perhaps Tennessee Williams’ greatest play, is no exception.   This is their first Tennessee Williams play, something director Bill Hayes felt the company could not do until they were ready.  Opening night occurred after one preview performance (delays in rehearsals courtesy of Hurricane Matthew), conceivably an obstacle in making this a totally flawless production.

Under the allegorical canopy of a tropical sky The Night of the Iguana unfolds as two improbable “kinsmen met a night” – the defrocked Reverend Lawrence Shannon and the persevering artist Hannah Jelkes.  Williams’ setting is an unforgiving universe where survival and endurance are requisite attributes.

As an epigram to the play, Williams quotes the last four lines of an Emily Dickinson poem, “I Died for Beauty.”   Shannon and Jelkes are indeed “brethren” in that they are out of place with the rest of the world on the Mexican coast at The Costa Verde Hotel in 1940 – an actual hotel where Williams himself stayed during that time, loosely basing the play on his own personal experience.

I quote the entire poem as it has relevancy in my opinion:

I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth, -the two are one;
We brethren are," he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.

The play is heavily constructed around symbolism and metaphor, the most obvious being a captured Iguana which is tied at the end of a rope awaiting slaughter.  It represents the human condition. Shannon exclaims that he is going to go down there with a machete and cut the damn lizard loose so it can run back to the bushes because God won’t do it and we are going to play God today.  The very difficult role of Rev. Shannon is played by Tim Altmeyer who endeavors to express the anguish of this tortured character, but at times he makes Shannon appear more pathetic than desperate. Unfortunately, not all of Altmeyer’s dialogue could be easily heard (or understood) and therefore some of Williams’ brilliant language was lost on the audience. 

Although Shannon is “a man of the cloth,” Hannah’s own theology (her philosophy of living) gives her the power of redemption, Shannon admitting to her that he arrived, at this place in time, his voice choking, to meet someone who wants to help me, Miss Jelkes.  Williams’ stage direction describes Hannah as “remarkable looking – ethereal, almost ghostly.  She suggests a Gothic cathedral image of a medieval saint, but animated.  She could be thirty, she could be forty: she is totally feminine and yet androgynous-looking – almost timeless.”  Katie Cunningham masters the mysterious Hannah, capturing her delicacy on the one hand, and her steely strength on the other.  Her performance is almost certainly what Williams had in mind when he originally wrote the part for Katharine Hepburn (who was unavailable at the time the play was staged). 

Jelkes has traveled to Mexico with her 98 year old Grandfather, Nonno.  He is a “minor” poet who hasn’t written anything in decades, but is now working on what will be his last poem.  Hannah and Nonno, in spite of their obvious education and Nantucket upbringing, are now reduced to a peripatetic life of “depending on the kindness of strangers” to borrow from another Tennessee Williams play, Hannah doing quick artistic sketches and Nonno reciting some of his poems for money and room and board.  Dennis Creaghan, the seasoned professional, his ninth time on stage at Dramaworks, plays Nonno, deftly mines his character’s aging angst trying to finish his first poem in 20 years.

A group of German tourists are also guests at the hotel.   As it is the summer of 1940, they are closely following the Battle of Britain on the radio.  Their demonic, bacchanalian behavior – and their sense of arrogance, knowing that they are “right”-- is juxtaposed to the inner struggles of Hannah and Shannon to find themselves. 

If Hannah is a Freudian superego, the other key female character, Maxine, is clearly the id.  She is sultrily played by another Dramaworks veteran, Kim Cozort Kay.  Maxine was married to Fred, Shannon’s friend, a Hemingwayesque character who, unknown to Shannon, had just recently died.  Shannon detoured his tour group-- women from a Texas Baptist college --  to the Costa Verde Hotel in a last ditch effort to salvage his job with the third-rate Blake Tours, hoping that Fred would be able to rescue him.

The woman who engaged Blake Tours for the Mexican tour, Judith Fellowes, is enraged by misrepresentations made of the tour and by Shannon’s one night sexual encounter with the youngest woman in the group, the 16 year old Charlotte Goodall, played by Alexandra Grunberg making her Dramaworks debut.   Fellowes is a one-dimensional character (always angry) but a catalyst, off stage and on, for moving the action; she is played by long time south Florida actor, Irene Adjan. 

With Fred deceased, Shannon is now desperately dependent on Maxine as she is on him.  Prior to his unexpected arrival, she was a lonely widow being “serviced” by two young Mexican boys, her only source of intimate human contact after years of a celibate marriage.  She needs Shannon, but he is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.  He has suffered these episodes before (“the spook” as he refers to it), a condition Maxine is very familiar with.


Williams masterfully brings all of these themes together probing Hannah and Shannon’s relationship and their recognition that they are both damaged creatures, at the end of their ropes.   Ultimately Shannon has to be restrained in a hammock, much the same way as the Iguana is tied, while he is pursued by “the spook.”   Hannah rescues him as he ultimately rescues the Iguana.  She observes while he is tied up:  Who wouldn’t like to suffer and atone for the sins of himself and the world if it could be done in a hammock with ropes instead of nails, on a hill that’s so much lovelier than Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, Mr. Shannon?  There’s something almost voluptuous in the way that you twist and groan in that hammock – no nails, no blood, no death.  Isn’t that a comparatively comfortable, almost voluptuous kind of crucifixion to suffer for the guilt of the world, Mr. Shannon? 

The play culminates in Nonno’s completion of his poem, one that embodies Williams’ themes, man’s relationship to nature, to God, to death and to a new kind of love that transcends “the earth's obscene corrupting love.”  Full circle back to Emily Dickinson’s virtuous love of beauty and truth, the two main characters’ “failures” (“he whispered softly for what I failed”) being an intimate knowledge of one another, a kind of uncorrupted understanding.  It is Williams’ most hopeful play, or, as he put it “how to live with dignity after despair.”

Executing this play is complicated.  Hayes strives to walk that fine line of being trapped in symbolism and the melodramatic, so typical of the theatre in the early 1960s, seeking to attain a sense of heightened realism.  His assistant director is Paula D'Alessandris.  Hayes is skillfully supported by the incredibly talented Dramaworks technicians.


Scenic design by Michael Amico craftily captures the theatrical realism of a hotel in decay, the encroaching active jungle, alive with danger, and the symbolic isolation of the separate rooms on the verandah (I think of the tombs in Dickinson’s poem).  Paul Black’s lighting design works in harmony with the set, characterizing a wide range of lighting challenges, late afternoon sun, sunset, a long night, and a severe storm.   

Matt Corey’s sound design serves up that storm, echoes from the hills, and appropriate guitar interludes, all in sync with the production.  Brian O'Keefe, PBD resident costume designer creatively captures the era and the sweltering heat, as well as Hannah’s stealthy delicacy, as if she is indeed otherworldly.

Other members of the large cast are David Nail, Michael Collins, Brian Varela, Thomas Rivera, David Hyland, Becca McCoy, Rebecca Tucker, and Jordon Armstrong.

Dramaworks’ The Night of the Iguana is an ambitious production by one of America’s greatest playwrights.