Theater Review: Five by Tenn - Five Landmark Plays by Tennessee Williams, New York - Page 3

Although Vieux Carre was ultimately produced as a full length play, all the one-acts of Five by Tenn contained the major themes which would again weave their way through most of his later plays. Nevetheless, a crucial distinction remains, for Vieux Carre was completed decades after Williams first conceived of it, while the plays of Five by Tenn were composed during Williams’s earliest years as a writer. The author's maturity lent greater depth and coherence to the themes revisited in Vieux Carre and served to temper and soften some of the guilt-steeped subject matter which had obsessed him from youth onward.

For instance, the fourth play presented, Why Do You Smoke so Much, Lily? was written in 1935, when the young playwright, still then in his twenties, was, like his youthful character Tom, a firsthand witness to an already tragically dysfunctional family psychodrama. This metaphysical new staging, however, sets the time in the 1920s, when Williams would have been either a young boy or teenager.

By the time a much older Williams had authored 1977’s full-length Vieux Carre, Mother DuClos — the central character in 1941’s Thank You, Kind Spirit — had been wholly replaced by the now fully "in control" Author who acts as both character and narrator of the play. He is, of course, none other than Williams himself, who first came to New Orleans’ French Quarter in 1939 at the age of 28, first to work for the WPA, but mainly to try to make a name for himself as a writer. All the scenes in Vieux Carre take place at the same boarding house where Williams first resided when he arrived, and are populated by the misfits and lost souls who rent rooms there along with the lonely, conflicted, and struggling young Williams.

However, for this inventive new staging, Mother DuClos (featuring a command performance by Natalie E. Carter) inhabits the Author’s dual role as central protagonist and author/master of ceremonies. Rather than a writer recalling his youth from the viewpoint of the 30-year-old Williams who wrote Kind Spirit in 1941, or the 60-something elder statesman of the theater who wrote Vieux Carre in 1977, Mother DuClos and her lost parishioners reside in “an abandoned building in New Orleans” in the 1960s following an unnamed disaster.

This decade was one of the most trying times for Williams both personally and professionally. His secretary of over 15 years, Frank Merlo — who had been lover and emotional support system to him since 1947 when he wrote A Streetcar Named Desire — died of cancer in 1963. This “abandonment” plunged Williams into a decade-long episode of deep depression, and few if any plays of critical “substance” were subsequently produced — at least publicly — until 1977’s Vieux Carre. In this production, the events recounted in the other four plays featured in Five by Tenn are not culled from the brief period during which Williams resided at this run-down boarding house on Toulouse Street, but rather span the four decades from the 1920s through the 1950s — a vast window of time which takes Williams and the audience from his earliest youth to an incredibly successful and productive early middle age.

Article Author: Elvira Black

Elvira Black is a “retired” New York writer blogging for her own amusement here on BC. Her passions are politics, the arts, the weird things we do, and New York City.

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