Garden District
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Cast:"Something Unspoken": Myra Carter (Cornelia), Pamela Payton-Wright (Grace). "Suddenly Last Summer": Elizabeth Ashley (Violet Venable), Victor Slezak (Dr. Cukrowicz), Peggy Cosgrave (Miss Foxhill), Celia Weston (Mrs. Holly) , Mitchell Lichtenstein (George Holly), Jordan Baker (Catherine Holly), Leslie Lyles (Sister Felicity).
"Something Unspoken" is certainly the less familiar of the two plays. It concerns Cornelia Scott (Myra Carter, late of "Three Tall Women"), a society matron angling for the top post -- and nothing less than the top post, thank you very much -- of the local chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy, and Grace Lancaster (Pamela Payton-Wright), who has been Cornelia's unflappable secretary and something more, as the title suggests, for 15 years.
Though much of "Something Unspoken" transpires in a series of telephone conversations with someone attending the meeting where Cornelia's fate is being decided, the intimacy that exists between these two women is lovingly -- though never reverently -- revealed. Under Theodore Mann's sensitive direction, the two roles are beautifully played, Carter's with a sly impishness that's positively endearing; Payton-Wright's with a nobility that's almost -- but not quite, in these genteel environs -- heartbreaking.
Too bad this is a play that demands a theatergoer's ability to see every verbal thrust-and-parry register on the actor's faces, and that Circle in the Square is a theater that makes such viewing impossible for a large part of the audience. It's disgraceful to present this play in the round, rather than the three-quarter thrust that would have let everyone in the audience appreciate this small gem.
"Suddenly Last Summer" is certainly the better-known of the two plays, primarily for Joseph Mankiewicz's 1959 film of Gore Vidal's screenplay. For connoisseurs of post-noir American gothic, few movies can top this one, with riveting performances by Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift and Mercedes McCambridge. The asylum scene alone -- with the humid Taylor provoking a typhoon of cage-rattling and drool among the inmates -- is worth the price of admission.
Of course, Williams had more in mind in this condensed, florid tale of a well-born poet who one summer traded his adoring but aging mother, Violet (Elizabeth Ashley), for his more fetching, if troubled, cousin Catherine (Jordan Baker, also late of "Three Tall Women") to accompany him on the exotic journey that produces his annual tome.
Sebastian Venable not only failed to produce a poemthat summer during a stay at a Spanish resort, he died hideously in an incident Violet is determined to have literally cut out of Catherine's consciousness. To that end, she appeals to the young Dr. Cukrowicz (Victor Slezak), whose experiments in lobotomy at a nearby institution are producing just the kind of results -- damn the long-term consequences -- that Violet is looking for.
Set in a jungle garden and drawn in unyieldingly lurid imagery, "Suddenly Last Summer" may nevertheless be Williams' most powerful statement about the dark side of art's creation, the part about artists being something less than social paragons. A successor to Blanche DuBois, Catherine made her debut in the French Quarter, she admits, long before her debut in the Garden District. She knows that Sebastian has used Violet and then her to procure pretty young men. But she also knows that "we all use each other, that's what we think of as love." She shares with Violet the belief that in his way, Sebastian was searching for God.
Violet is a monster who cannot abide this trashy child from her late husband's side of the family, and while Ashley (who may be as close to a Sophia Loren-like beauty as we have) gets the determination right, she's unappealingly and unrelentingly gruff, missing the hauteur that separates her from the rest of the gathering clan.
The revelation here is Baker, who has to navigate a long, horrific monologue that would have been right at home in "Titus Andronicus." Though some of her line readings are strange, in whole Baker manages a dignified and compelling performance, not least in the steamy, charged mix of edginess and languor she conveys even while towering over everyone around her. The story of Sebastian Venable's demise is jammed with indelible images -- of a sun like a "huge white bone that had caught on fire in the sky," of the gobbling noises made by "featherless little black sparrows" who would eventually devour the poet.
Harold Scott's staging also suffers in the space -- there's endless, heavy-handed repositioning of actors to give everyone a look -- and Violet's jungle garden is meagerly suggested in Zack Brown's setting (though his costumes for both plays are exquisite). Nevertheless, this production is more involving than last season's Williams crowd-pleaser, "The Rose Tattoo," on this stage.
Sets, costumes, Zack Brown; lighting, Marc B. Weiss; music, Kevin Farrell; sound, Bruce Cameron; fights, B.H. Barry; casting, Rosalie Joseph; production stage manager, Linda Harris. Artistic directors, Mann , Josephine Abady; managing director, Robert Bennett. Opened Oct. 10, 1995, at Circle in the Square. Reviewed Oct. 11; 499 seats; $ 50 top. Running time: 2 HOURS, 40 MIN.
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