ARTS REVIEW: 'A HOUSE NOT MEANT TO STAND' AT THE FOUNTAIN THEATER
Tennessee Williams’ Birthday Centennial Play Entertains and Reveals
(February 26, 2011) When I heard that the Fountain, one of L.A.’s most prestigious theaters, was producing Tennessee Williams’ last play to honor his centennial birthday, I was excited. Tennessee Williams was a fixed spot in my literary heart--half-real, half-idealized since I was aware of the difficulties in his later years, but oh those early years. He called the play a comedy, but a “Gothic” comedy.
It was a lively and boisterous romp and reminded me, in style and spirit, of an early play, Baby Doll, but, I thought, after a lifetime of his plays that had been beacons of theater for me, why this one as his memorial? And for younger audiences who might not know the power of his plays, I wondered, why this “Southern Gothic“ look at a family in the last throes of disintegration, but without the sense of unity and the diamond polish of his early plays?
But…by the time I had driven a few miles, thinking, I realized I had made a critical error. Tennessee Williams was a writer who always laid his own open heart naked on the table. And with this “comedy” at the end of his life, he had done the same thing. I had been given the privilege of witnessing a splendid production of what was a final cry (laugh?) of despair. Now, at the end…a broken house, rain coming through the roof, the lights giving out, and nothing left but a senile old lady with a fantasy of having her lost children back around her kitchen table.
Here was the play. As lights come up on the selfish, blustery, self-absorbed Cornelius (same name as Williams’ father), the “house” is literally coming down on his head. He’s just returned from the funeral of his homosexual son--no emotional reaction except that his roof is leaking, the lights are not working properly, and he is still searching for money he believes his wife has hidden from him. His only remaining son, Charlie, has just returned with his pregnant girlfriend. He excoriates the son for being a lazy do-nothing. His wife is undone, drifting into senility (a remarkable performance by Sandy Martin who played the cruel Selma in the HBO winner Big Love), trying to resist her husband’s efforts to “put her away” so he can get the money and go into politics (he got 10 votes in the last election).
Add to this mix, a next door neighbor who has blown the family money on plastic surgery so she can attract young men, and a gun-toting husband who tries to seduce the son’s girlfriend. Sex, avarice, the only kindness coming from the son, Charlie, who tries to help his mother but actually is waiting for his parents to die to inherit the property.
A House Not Meant to Stand is a darkly comedic version of Tennessee Williams’ familiar themes: the yearning heart, the frantic heart, the damaged heart, and family cruelty. No happy ending here, only the longing of the half-senile mother (…again, an amazing performance by Sandy Martin) for her lost children, a longing for that old solid around-the-table family love that had disappeared or perhaps never existed. I’m not saying Little House on the Prairie stuff. Just a simple loving family dinner. Now time is at an end. And all that’s left is her fantasy. Where so many of his plays, at least the ones that were part of the library of my own heart, offered a bit of hope at the end--this one did not.
Tennessee Williams’ plays have always centered around family, yearning for love, unjust treatment of those who transgress conventional sexual boundries, but he usually leaves us with one character who is understanding and hopeful. Glass Menagerie. A young man is caught by responsibility to a family whose desperate, insatiable need will trap him forever. Sweet Bird of Youth. A boy thrown out of town by the ruthless family of the girl he loves, now returns as the lover of an aging actress afraid that the reviews of her recent film will destroy her forever, using sex with the boy as a drug. She will be his passport back to his young love. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. A young man caught between his wife and his best friend; the screen version avoids the implication of a homosexual relationship, but she is Maggie the Cat, scampering any way she can to keep her husband who rejects her. The fallen priest of Night of the Iguana has finally broken down and, now tied in a hammock to keep him from suicide, listens to the spinster’s explanation of the “spooks” that haunt her, and that explanation, the most touching and enlightening speech on the real meaning of love. Unforgettable lines. Orpheus Descending. Desire of a wife to escape from a cruel husband, sexual love for a young man, and threats of emasculation. Suddenly Last Summer. A boy destroyed by a rapacious mother.
Theater in my era--figure that I saw Glass Menagerie in New York in 1945--had a different meaning. More like Greek theater, where a play revealed or illuminated or examined, and you left the theater which had captured you for a couple of hours with something new, maybe something that might affect how you lived or gave you a new light on an old misconception. A good play grabs you from the get-go and takes you somewhere else, and at the end, releases you into the light of day, somehow changed.
Although new playwrights emerge, today’s audience has changed. Time has speeded up. We have iPods and Tweeting and Facebook that, with a couple of touches to a screen, helped to arouse a powerful revolution that will change the political face of this world. Everything happens fast. I had at first judged the play from a slower era, where there was more time to think, to consider the ironies of life when you ran out of gas and had to walk blocks to find a public phone to call the Auto Club.
Now I see that, in Simon Levy’s strong presentation of a challenging play, Tennessee Williams did what he always did: Created larger-than-life characters, presented the violence and cruelty of avarice, cold men with closed hearts, unwilling to look beyond society’s frozen boundaries. But the play was written by a master at the end of his life: hooked on seconal, drinking too much, a homosexual having had the guts to come out of the closet long before the closet door opened, now having lost his long-time companion, knowing that he had lost some of his audience…but dammit still out there astonishing and provoking. He died in a hotel room, so they say, trying to put eyedrops into his eyes, holding the bottle cap in his mouth. He swallowed it. It choked him to death.
From me personally, I thank Simon Levy and the award-winning Fountain Theater for bringing me Williams’ birthday centennial and the play which entertained, and then distressed, and on further thought became for me an epitaph for an art which drew from the playwright’s own life, his sharing of his own struggles, and at the end, trying what he said in his notes was a new and different style, not with the same tight unity but still showing flashes of his early brilliance and leaving us with a most unusual scene for Tennessee Williams: a mother yearning for a simple dinner table with all her children around her.
Aside from the remarkable Sandy Martin, Alan Blumenfeld gave a strong performance as the loud-mouthed father; Lisa Richards the neighbor obsessed with young men; Robert Graighead her gun-toting womanizing husband; Daniel Billet as the hapless Charlie; and a wonderful religious ecstasy scene by Virginia Newcomb.
This show has been extended to run until May 22, 2011 at the Fountain Theater, 5060 Fountain Avenue, Hollywood, California - (323) 663-1525
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