Theater Review: Five by Tenn - Five Landmark Plays by Tennessee Williams, New York - Page 5

Brenda Bell, Natalie E. Carter and Sylvia Mincewicz in Thank You, Kind Spirit
But there is one perennial skeptic in the crowd — the Woman in Rear (played with wry and biting sarcasm by Joyce Feurring), who, sitting closest to the audience in the front of the stage, makes periodic cynical asides to no one and anyone in particular as to the dubiousness of Mother’s claims. Mother, in turn, senses an “unkind presence” in her midst, one who will exact her full revenge by the end of the evening. As Mother and Second Young Woman thank the Kind Spirit for his/her guidance, Mother passes the basket around and continues singing until she hears the echoed voices of “spirits” who intone over and over: “Talk to me… talk to me like the rain and let me listen.” As the thunder and the rain beat down outside the lone window, the second play opens.

Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let me Listen(1945) — written one year after his first breakaway success The Glass Menagerie and two years after his sister Rose’s botched lobotomy — here takes place in the same room in the 1950s. A man (played on alternate nights by Daniel Kipler and Chris Ford) and a Woman (played by Nina Covalesky/Elizabeth Clark) carry on a “dialogue” that chiefly consists of alternating, poignant, poetic monologues. The Man has returned after days of drunken debauchery, the details of which are hazy to him since most of them were experienced while in a blackout.

The Woman has been sitting and waiting for his return in a passive, vegetative state. She has not eaten, and, like a fragile, fading southern rose, has remained there — silent, helpless, and alone — with only water to drink and the rain beating relentlessly outside. The play opens with the Man languishing on the bed and the Woman sitting stiffly in a chair. In between his own monologues, he alternately entreats his lover to come to bed and to “talk” to him “like the rain” and let him “listen.”

Nina Covalesky and Daniel Kipler in Talk To Me Like the Rain and Let Me
Listen
And talk she does — in almost neverending torrents. And listen he does — to her sorrowful, poetic soliloquy as she reveals that she wants to “go away” to a place by the sea where she can live alone in a room where the rain casts cool shadows on the walls. All her expenses will be taken care of and her kind, motherly landlady, who will have a daughter, will tell her how her daughter is doing when the Woman stops by to collect her mail. She will sometimes venture into town, anonymous and undisturbed, perhaps strolling by the sea or occasionally attending a movie where she will sit silently in the darkness amongst strangers and immerse herself in the fictional lives of the characters on the screen. A year will pass, and then a decade, and finally she will look in the mirror and see with little surprise that her hair has turned white and she has lived there for half a century. One day she will go to the sea and fade away, having wasted away over time to almost nothing, getting thinner and thinner and more and more ethereal until she ceases to exist at all.

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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