Poetic Truth-Telling Prevails in ‘Billy and Me’ by Terry Teachout at Palm Beach Dramaworks

Blow out the candle of the present and imagine going back in time into Tennessee Williams’ memory revealing his relationship with William Inge.  That opportunity has been remarkably created by Terry Teachout in his latest play, Billy and Me, world premiering at Palm Beach Dramaworks.  Williams and Inge were among the playwright elites, friends, and possibly even lovers.  Teachout, a well known critic, playwright, and writer, is guided more by his knowledge of the two men and their plays than by historical record.  He has created a provocative new drama of uncompromising art and imaginative truth, vividly executed under the direction of William Hayes, PBD Producing Artistic Director, who inspired the idea for the play. In fact, the play is a major collaborative effort between these two professionals.

It is a memory play like The Glass Menagerie which is a centripetal force throughout.  Williams is the narrator and a character in Billy and Me as is Tom in The Glass Menagerie.   Both plays even end with the same three words.

In the opening act, Williams is anxiously awaiting reviews of The Glass Menagerie after Chicago tryouts on New Year’s Eve, 1944.  The setting is a gay bar where he is also waiting for a relatively unknown critic he once met who has come to review the play, William Inge.  Inge who is furtively gay, shows up in a faltering state, terrified of the bar scene and seeing Tennessee Williams again.  He is stunned by his unpretentious way of living his life openly and particularly of his gift for poetic language.  He is so staggered by the play’s force and honesty that he timidly confesses he’s thought of becoming a playwright himself.  He is goaded on by Williams: “You’ve got to write about sissy little Billy Inge. You got to be him. Face it and tell it, starting right here in this dump. No more secrets! No more shame! Live your life! You hear me? It’s all you’ve got! There isn’t anything else!”

Tom Wahl, Nicholas Richberg; Photo by Alicia Donelan

And it is language Teachout so perfectly captures, bringing his interpretation of both men to the stage, the repressed Inge, and the charismatic, poetic Williams.  He incorporates special conceits, the audience being allowed behind the hallowed veil of backstage, the setting of the play’s scenes and breaking the fourth wall to speak to the audience or visiting his inner self to address his mother and sister Rose.

It’s a dizzying journey and the second act bursts upon the stage some 15 years later, with the unthinkable, Inge’s first commercial failure, A Loss of Roses being panned by the critics after years of Broadway and film hits.  In contrast to the sleazy bar scene of the first act we witness Inge’s badge of prosperity, his Sutton Place apartment, replete with a Willem de Kooning painting and all the trappings of monetary success as the framed posters from the Broadway productions of Come Back, Little Sheba, Picnic, Bus Stop, and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs attest.  

In contrast to Tennessee Williams’ rise in the first act, is his apparent career stagnation in the second, which brings out his monstrous jealousy of Inge, in spite of his apparent attempts to console his friend.  He reminds Inge that it was his encouragement and contacts – particularly Audrey Wood his agent -- which paved the way for his friend’s success.  The table is set for the play’s gripping climax which begins with a contretemps between the two about their plays, the kind of argument no friend can win, gathering intensity to a near calamitous result. 

Nicholas Richberg as Tennessee Williams; Photo by Cliff Burgess

As much as Tennessee Williams is the luminary of Billy and Me, the play’s dramatic arc is about William Inge.  But the story about how Inge became a playwright and the impact Williams had on his career, could not have been compellingly told without the bravura performance by Nicholas Richberg who strikingly captures Williams’ flamboyant persona.  His transformation in real time, on stage from the aged Tennessee Williams to his younger self, and then back again is heartbreakingly effective. His comic timing is carefully executed, inhabiting Williams’ personal pathos and vitriolic embrace of the truth, frequently in an alcoholic daze.   He carries the play’s poetry, some quoted from The Glass Menagerie but most penned by Teachout.  “Beauty is truth, truth beauty – start with the truth and then make it beautiful.”

In many ways Tom Wahl’s challenge in portraying William Inge is the playwright himself.  Teachout could take just so many liberties with a character who mostly eschewed the public spotlight, especially when held up to the brassy extroverted nature of his counterpart.  Wahl stoically holds his own, courageously portraying a conflicted character, shy, insecure, secretly gay, and an alcoholic like Williams.  His role as straight man is compellingly acted with self loathing and awkward pauses that successfully capture a deeply disturbed man.

Tom Wahl as William Inge;  Photo by Cliff Burgess

There is a reference made in both acts that the two writers are “speckled eggs.”  As Inge relates it, his mother “called me…her ‘speckled egg’…. I wonder how you ever got into my nest.”  Wahl’s character never is able to break through the shell.  It is heartbreaking to watch, a metaphor for anyone who has ever felt like an outsider.  It’s a difficult part and Wahl emerges as that self-effacing, insecure writer, a character with whom the audience can easily empathize.

Cliff Burgess, a PBD veteran, effectively plays three different characters, the impassive stage manager, the flirtatious waiter, and a somewhat comical doctor.  All three roles are integral to the drama, validating both playwrights.  He creates needed pauses from the taut action on stage.

Tom Wahl, Cliff Burgess, Nicholas Richberg; Photo by Samantha Mighdoll

The skillful scenic design by Victor Becker is representational, effectively highlighting the stark contrast between the dank and seedy bar room scene of the first act to Inge’s affluent Sutton Place apartment in the second.  Each part of the scenery is moved as Williams recalls it from memory.  In fact, when the audience arrives, the stage is simply a backstage set creating an anticipation of the action to follow.

Paul Black, the lighting designer picks up on that with constructive lighting, carving out space where there may be a black wall in the background, casting light to make the abstract seem real.  His lighting on the aged Tennessee Williams is particularly effective in achieving the suspension of disbelief.

David Thomas is the sound designer and there is an interesting back-story to his PBD debut.  Three years ago Thomas was the sound designer for the off-Broadway revival of Inge’s A Loss of Roses which is the subject of Act II of this play.  Terry Teachout reviewed that revival, praised the play, and David Thomas’ musical selections, and unknown to him, Bill Hayes hired him for Billy and Me.  Clairvoyantly, Williams says to Inge: “Hell, maybe all those bastards are wrong about Roses. Who knows? Maybe in fifty years some hotshot producer will dig up the script and a new bunch of bastards will go see it and say, ‘You know what? Those other bastards—they were wrong!’”  Teachout is ironically one of the “new bunch.”

Thomas has a lot to work with for sound, the singing of the drunken men in the unseen back room of the bar, the music on the jukebox, and magical elements that work with the memory aspects of the play.  As quoted by both Williams and Inge (from The Glass Menagerie): “In memory everything happens to music” and the sounds are evocative.

Costume designer extraordinaire, Brian O’Keefe, who is PBD’s Resident Designer, while needing a limited number of costumes for the five different characters plus stagehands in the play, imaginatively reinforces all the personalities and the different periods of the two acts with his usual creative touch.

William Hayes, the Director, has taken many dramatic inventions and put them seamlessly together into one flowing production, and we’re caught up in the illusion.  His inspired staging clearly conveys Teachout’s structure and words and the underlying message: be true to ones’ self and if you are a writer, write --- claim your artistic destiny!

As Williams said in the prologue to The Glass Menagerie, “Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.”  The same can be said for this superb production, worthy of this world premiere, destined to go beyond its Palm Beach Dramaworks origins.

 

Goodbye SLR

I haven’t written about photography in a while and I think that’s because of the stage in my life and the encroachment (or more accurately, the replacement) of the SLR with the smart phone.  There was the time in my life that I’d pack my Nikon SLR, lenses as well, when I traveled or felt like going on a local photographic sojourn.  No doubt I used to take it more seriously, although I was never a professional like my father.  I had my own darkroom some 40 years ago and did a lot of black and white photography, gravitating to idiosyncratic subjects, but always one eye on the prosaic, scenes we just take for granted in everyday life. 

A New York Times article about a Stephen Shore exhibition at the MoMA reminds me of the kind of photography I liked as an amateur, never serious enough to fully give myself over to photography as an art.  As years went by I did more of what everyone did, photographing the kids as they grew up, family occasions, trips that we took, allowing what ever existed of an artistic eye to mostly atrophy. 

Now, I never go anywhere with my SLR and although I’ve invested in a digital camera that can practically replicate everything an SLR can do, even that rarely goes with me unless I want telephoto capability, usually only on trips.  The smart phone has changed everything and now I find myself taking more sunrise and sunset and landscape and nature photography with it, sometimes mindlessly posting them on Twitter.

But I read about Stephen Shore’s career and wonder what could have been (Stephen Shore’s MoMA Survey Shows a Restless Reformer as a Master of Photography). I was particularly intrigued by the NYT’s observation that “he produced suites of photographs, shaped by a single principle, which pictured anodyne Americana in impassive repetition.”  Yes, that could have been what I was aspiring to do but have long since abandoned.

In that article you can see his photograph “Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975.”  It depicts a commonplace street scene in which Chevron and Texaco gas stations are conspicuous.  Although unremarkable, it’s remarkable.  The last time I toted my SLR was on a trip we took to the Southwest about ten years ago, and I took some photos of “anodyne Americana,” my favorite being a gas station along Route 66:

But there are others in the same region, and of other pieces of Americana captured on that trip such as a political rally advertised at a local diner…

The infinite stretch of Route 66 and freight trains running alongside….

Or the side of a garage in Arizona…

I wonder what could have been if photography was my vocation, but I had a publishing career and a family life to lead and now the rest is history.  So now my iPhone photographs are usually scenes outside my home or in my neighborhood. These still makes me feel connected to my photographic roots (my father’s commercial photography business established by my great grandfather in 1866). 

Here are some posted on Twitter or some just recently taken:

And here I’ll sneak in a personal shot, Thanksgiving buffet at our house showing the two cooks, our friend Sydelle and my wife Ann, taken, of course, with the iPhone. 

Plus, my favorite sunset shot, taken with one of the early digital cameras, a Sony Mavica, at a Block Island dock perhaps twenty + years ago, three men silhouetted in the foreground…

Adios SLR

Cameras I Have Known

‘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. 8^th.  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 2^nd’ 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 31^st with previews on December 6 and 7.  

UPDATE:  My Review of the play now posted