Theater Review: Five by Tenn - Five Landmark Plays by Tennessee Williams, New York - Page 4

Thank You, Kind Spirit is the first play presented, and Mother DuClos, likeVieux Carre’s aging author, transcends her role as this plays’s central character as her presence weaves itself in and out of the four plays to follow. A true spiritualist in the Creole tradition of the old French Quarter, her “power” flows from a combination of devout Catholicism (Williams converted to Catholicism as well) and the spells and incantations of voodoo (Glass’s Tom also wished to become a “magician” who could eradicate the pain he brought to others when he broke free from his family). The “magic” is that of the author’s own making; the “spirits” Mother DuClos conjures up are the family, friends, and acquaintances of Williams’ own life; the “voodoo” is evidenced in the characters thus conjured up, transformed and enhanced by the writer’s memories, and colored in both bright and somber tones via his artful imagination.

Natalie Carter as Mother DuClos in Thank You, Kind Spirit along with, from left, Emily Arrington, Joyce Feurring, Michael Culhane, Lennard Sillevis, Trish Montoya, Sylvia Mincewicz and Candice Palladino.
Is this African American “mother” figure a true medium or a fraud? A kindly soul or a charlatan? A righteous woman or yet another lost soul trying to mask the depravity hidden beneath a saintly facade? Does she really channel the spirits, does she really hear the voices? And what will become of her — yet another deluded, ultimately tormented Williams character — in the end? The answer to that at first seems inevitable; like her author, she seems destined to remain both victim and healer, saint and sinner, compulsively trying to mend the “unmendable” past and attempting over and over to reconcile all her sins of omission and commission.

Mother DuClos and her small circle of followers remain seated at stage left in the same abandoned room in the old Quarter throughout the play. Alternately singing and prophesizing, Mother entreats the “Kind Spirit” to not only conjure up the ghosts of those who have inhabited this room in the decades before her, but to help her channel the visions that will bring hope to the hopeless and abandoned congregants who now huddle around her. Among these is the “Second Young Woman,” played with consummate southern belle guilelessness and charm by Sylvia Mincewicz, who wants to know when her husband, who has left, in typical Williams style, without warning or explanation, will at last return home from his drunken wanderings. After much chanting and incantations, Mother is possessed by the Spirit and tells the Second Young Woman that her husband will return to her—around Christmastime, or perhaps a little before—presumably after his debauches have at last left him penniless and repentant. Her word can (perhaps) be trusted, since as the de facto Author, she does in fact hold the fate of all characters, past and present, in her hands.

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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