Theater Review: Five by Tenn - Five Landmark Plays by Tennessee Williams, New York - Page 6

In addition to being an apparent referent for the now isolated, lobotomized Rose, Talk is a direct precursor to a character who will later appear in Vieux Carre — a young, tubercular woman in an adjoining apartment who stays alone and sick in her room while her drug addicted, reprobate husband comes and goes at will. At the end of the play, the Author must decide whether to stay and help the woman to escape or abandon her and the insane, soul-killing atmosphere of the boarding house and its inhabitants, just as Tom/Williams did in Menagerie. Parts of this theme will emerge yet again in Suddenly, Last Summer when young Catherine Holly is encouraged to talk — with the aid of a truth serum — to the psychosurgeon who has been summoned by her aunt in an attempt to silence her insane “rantings” (concerning a terrible incident that led to her homosexual son’s death by cannibalism) with a lobotomy.

Hello from Bertha (1939) is for the purposes of this production also set in the 1930s and was written during the same year Williams came to the French Quarter for the first time. Like most of Williams’ plays, its R-rated material is cloaked behind its G-rated language — mild enough so that the children who sat near me could, along with their parents, enjoy an all-American family night of entertainment together — with the children perhaps taking the language literally while the parents saw through to the obvious implications between the lines.

As the play begins, we see Bertha (superbly played by Kay Bailey, complete with languid southern lilt and fitful drawl), an ailing, aging drunk (and/or prostitute), lying prone on a bed in a fitful near sleep, plagued by a relentless “sick headache.” She is soon disturbed by Goldie, her landlady/madam played with delightful, spiteful maliciousness by Margaret O’Connor, who insists that she must vacate the bed, the room, and the building at once because the space is needed for the “other girls” who can still pay their rent (or cut) to her. Bertha entreats her to leave her be and let her nurse her hangover from the night before, but Goldie declares her intention to call the authorities and have Bertha taken to a mental institution where she will be fed and housed at no charge, and she can rest and “recover” from her drunken, half-insane ravings without worry or bother to anyone.

Goldie, like Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar and countless other Williams villains, relentlessly, meticulously delivers Bertha of her most cherished delusions by declaring her to be a worthless, insane, immoral drunk and worse. Williams, who believed that people were destroyed by others’ attempts to thwart their fragile dreams and silence the truth (via wanton cruelty, lies, or even psychosurgery if necessary), presents Goldie as both heartlessly brazen “truth” teller and instrument of Bertha’s imminent confinement.

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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