Theater Review: Five by Tenn - Five Landmark Plays by Tennessee Williams, New York - Page 8

Mrs. Yorke, who is seen preparing for an evening out as the play opens, will leave Lily mercifully alone to her own devices — in this case, her cigarettes and her books — for a few hours. Nevertheless, she can’t resist nagging Lily not only about her compulsive smoking but about her apparent refusal to engage the attentions of suitable young men. She reminds Lily of the opportunity she missed on a recent cruise which was also attended by a number of charming young bachelors. Lily, however, was well aware that these bachelors were eminently unsuitable since they were, in fact, all homosexual.

Still fuming, literally and figuratively, as her mother closes the door and exits the apartment, Lily hurriedly extinguishes her last butt, impulsively rises from her chair, and slowly and with great relish deposits the contents of her overflowing cup/ ashtray all over the front of the stage. After sitting in front of her mirrored bureau and bemoaning her fate for awhile, she eventually returns to her chair at stage right. Exhausted by her ruminations, she begins to hear echoed voices of her mother admonishing her about her smoking and other failings, and endures a hellacious hallucination of her mother, who abruptly appears in red backlit silhouette at the front door, writhing around suggestively in what looks to be a decidedly un-genteel negligee. Lily then passes out, but awakens again when her mother returns from her night on the town, and once again, Mrs. Yorke’s litany on the vices of smoking and the virtues of social interaction are repeated ad infinitum as the play ends.

The final play presented is The Lady of Larkspur Lotion (1941). Also originally designed to be incorporated into Vieux Carre (as indeed it is, well over three decades later), it concerns another Bertha-esque character — also broke, also during the Depression — whose ersatz "faded southern belle" composure is disrupted when her landlady, one Mrs. Wire, barges in demanding the back rent on pain of immediate eviction. Mrs. Hardwicke-Moore (in a truly remarkable performance by Rebecca Street) is clearly another precursor to Blanche in Streetcar. Here, in an unsuccessful yet poignant attempt to weasel her way out of paying the rent, she complains to Mrs. Wire that she is unaccustomed to an abode that not only is infested with cockroaches, but big flying ones at that. Declaring that her rooming house has no more cockroaches and fewer bedbugs than any other in the Quarter, Mrs. Wire again demands her back rent at once on pain of immediate eviction.

This landlady is, in fact, the self-same Mrs. Wire who will appear in Vieux Carre, who is in turn modeled after Williams’ own landlady who held court in that same shabby boarding house in the Quarter back in 1939. It was said that she was so maniacal that she would sleep in the corridors in order to prevent her tenants from engaging in their “immoral” pursuits, and was once said to have dug a hole in the floor and poured boiling water onto the occupants of the room below after suspecting them of engaging in unsavory activities. Barbara Ann Davison does justice to the role as the stocky, bespectacled, relentlessly moralistic and materialistic landlady, hell bent on getting her back rent at any cost.

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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