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John Buchanan (Jason Dechert) and Alma Winemiller (Deborah Puette) in The Eccentricities of a Nightingale. |
By Ed Rampell
The immortal Tennessee Williams is one of our poets of the footlights and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale is a tender, touching drama with lyrical dialogue. If a picture speaks a thousand words, Williams’ words speak volumes.
First off, it was frankly disconcerting that The Eccentricities of a Nightingale premiere opened with a pitch for donations, and ticket buyers who came to hear William's deathless dialogue had to pay for the honor of sitting through about five minutes (it felt more like months) of money grubbing. This, on top of having already sprung about $46 per person for tix, not to mention Allah knows how much moolah for gas to deepest, darkest Glendale’s hinterlands, parking, babysitters, etc. It’s bad enough that we’re forced to pay to hear ads on cable TV and in cinemas, must we also endure “and now, a word from our sponsor” in the sacred precincts of the legit stage? I have been informed that this pitching will continue throughout the run of this play so I recommend that theatergoers inquire as to the actual curtain time per se, and arrive then, as a way of protesting the over-commercialization that seeks to consume everything in this money mad society.
Well, you can place the above rant in the “Don’t-Get-Me-Started” file, but after the proverbial curtain thankfully rose the solicitation had been so annoying it took me about 10 minutes to get into the play. But once the fireworks -- literally and figuratively -- began (and your cantankerous critic simmered down), what an otherwise splendid production A Noise Within has mounted!
Set way down yonder in the land of cotton, where sexuality seems forgotten (or, more accurately, forbidden), The Eccentricities of a Nightingale explores the foibles and frustrations of small-minded small townsfolk in Mississippi (where Tennessee was born in 1911). This is familiar terrain for Williams aficionados: The larger than life Big Daddy from 1955’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; the overbearing mother Amanda in 1944’s The Glass Menagerie; her sister Southern belle Blanche DuBois of 1948’s A Streetcar Named Desire, plus many other Williams characters would have felt right at home in The Eccentricities of a Nightingale Magnolia milieu. When it came to Deep South exposes, Williams rendered onstage what Thomas Wolfe, Carson McCullers, Harper Lee and William Faulkner wrought on page.
Alma Winemiller (Deborah Puette) commits a grave sin in her backward backwoods berg of not-so-Glorious Hills: She dares to be different. Her father (Mitchell Edmonds) belittles her extravagantly eccentric affectations and gesticulations in an effort to shame her into conforming.
Alma, who seems to be becoming “a woman of a certain age,” has desperate yearnings for her all-too-perfect neighbor, John Buchanan (the dapper Jason Dechert, a pip of a thesp). The boy next door seems to have it all: Good looks, money and a brilliant future as a doctor. But he is also afflicted with a mother (Christopher Callen) who’s a castrating harpie. With a single line of dialogue Tennessee deftly reveals not only how Mrs. Buchanan emasculates her offstage husband, but also how this affects John, too.
Man, this Ol’ Miss bard doesn’t miss a thing; Tennessee wields a pen the way the Scarlet Pimpernel twirls a rapier! In any case, despite his apparent perfections, John has a yen for Alma -- something Mrs. Buchanan sets out to thwart, as the hamlet’s weirdo isn’t good enough for her little prince, for whom she has big plans.
Thus the stuff of tragedy unfolds on the boards -- although leavened and lightened by some welcome Williamsian wit. The scene where Alma hosts a meeting of Glorious Hill’s ludicrous misfits is a simply glorious bit of tomfoolery. The hilarious mistreatment of the aspiring playwright Vernon (the hapless David L.M. McIntyre) is Tennessee’s commentary on the lot of the dramatist, thinly veiled by drollery. Veteran actress Jacque Lynn Colton is worth her ample weight in gold as the dour dowager Mrs. Bassett, hounding the assorted not-so-literati band of outsiders, disrupting a presentation on Mr. William Blake because the illustrator of Dante’s Inferno and John Milton’s Paradise Lost was too smutty. It’s pretty nutty!
The artsy set by scenic designer Joel Daavid is evocatively surreal, and there’s good use of silhouettes, suggesting, perhaps, our other selves. Damaso Rodriguez does an admirable job directing the actors and staging their mise-en-scene. The cast is excellent, and in the lead role the peerless Puette delivers a bravura performance. From her fluttering mannerisms to her songbird warbling to her lilting Southern accent (a creative concoction, by the way, as Puette does not speak that way offstage), Puette’s heartbreaking portrayal reminds us that “Alma” is Latin for “soul.” To paraphrase William's most famous character, Stanley Kowalski: “Hey stellar!” – because that’s Ms. Puette’s depiction.
Aside from the commercial interruption at the opening of the play, I have to say that philosophically I hated the final scene, although this is not the fault of the otherwise flawless A Noise Within cast and crew. It is rather the pathetic outlook of poor Williams -- who, by the way, if you listen closely to the dialogue quite accurately predicts his own demise. What tragic things this broken Southern gent endured.
Tennessee Williams’ The Eccentricities of a Nightingale runs through May 28 at A Noise Within, 234 South Brand Blvd., Glendale, CA 91204. For more info: 818/240-0910, Ext. 1; www.anoisewithin.org
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