"... magnificent, compelling, dynamic and fascinating"

July 20, 2006 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

Tennessee Williams’ plays have long been a staple at Williamstown Theatre Festival, memorable for innovative staging and dynamic presentation. "Sweet Bird of Youth" carries on the tradition.

Set in St Cloud, a small gulf coast town in Mississippi on Easter Sunday in 1959, the three act play, which runs approximately three hours, centers around the violence that erupts in that small town when a native son, Chance Wayne, comes back to impress the girl he loves.

Derek Cecil as Chance Wayne
photo © Kevin Sprague

Chance is a loser. He is handsome, an aspiring actor, riding on his good looks and his second class talent. He has grown up in St Cloud, gotten his first taste of fame, in a local high school drama tournament. However, when the group went on to the national contest, they lost (came in second or fourth depending on who’s counting), and Chance in self-pity, bribed a porter on the train for an hour alone with his girl co-star, Heather Finley, seduction scene, age 17.

Self pitying but undaunted, Chance has left town, where Boss Finley, a bigoted right wing politico has separated the young lovers, and in the dozen years that have passed since the high school romance, has gained minor fame, in the chorus of Oklahoma. Riding on his good looks and boyish charm, he has evidently had a wide seduction record, even picked up a venereal disease which he managed to transmit to Heather on a stealthy visit to St Cloud.

Now years have passed. Chance is 29, back in St Cloud with a has-been movie star, drug addicted but wealthy, staying with her in the town’s best hotel and hoping to impress Heather and the natives as he rides about in the movie star’s white limo brandishing a somewhat bogus movie contract. To his credit (and he needs it) he’s unaware that Heather has not only picked up his disease but surgery has made her sterile.

Margaret Colin as
Princess Kosmonopolis
photo © Kevin Sprague

Boss Finley, almost a caricature of a Dixiecrat, and his scary son Tom Junior, are determined to make Chance pay, and their orchestrated hatred is there in the plot which almost escapes into melodrama.

This is the decadent South with its heap of horrors. Southern Gothic at its scariest.

And despite this, the production is magnificent, compelling, dynamic and fascinating.

The two leads, Derek Cecil as Chance Wayne, and Margaret Colin as Princess Kosmonopolis, (decayed but still beautiful Hollywood star, who has dashed into drugs and depression after fleeing a screening of her latest film) do the impossible with their roles. They succeed in making us care for them, as they amazingly develop from their first decadent scene where they must close the blinds against the sunlight that streams in from the beachfront into their opulent hotel room, a scene revealing each at his/her worst, totally unsympathetic, to the final scene in the same hotel room, darkness, middle of the night, eviction, flight or non-flight, from the pursuing vigilantes who want both out of town. Both give outstanding performances.

As do Gerry Bamman as the hypocrite, Boss Finley, one of the scariest politicians to rule a town, who is ably abetted by his son Tom, Junior (Christopher Evan Welch) as maniacal, vindictive brother of poor seduced Heather (Bess Wohl), virginal in white, trying to defy daddy but forced into a Confederate flag-waving parade and onto daddy’s platform where his tirade is one of the most creatively staged moments in this creatively staged play.

And this is not a play easily staged. The play is definitely realistic, but the characters at times address the audience directly, and while as a structure this has proved effective for Williams in Glass Menagerie (with only Tom, on the fire-escape employing it and framing the play) in Sweet Bird, it is employed erratically by only two characters, and seems Williams himself talking more than the character, especially when Chance turns to the audience and states: "I do not ask for your pity or even your understanding. I ask you only to recognize me in yourselves."

This seems pure Williams, and leaves the audience possibly uneasy but unwilling to go all the way. Is it Williams self-pity for some of his own plays that were not the successes of his early triumphs, although he later rose beyond his failures and back to Broadway successes? What in ourselves must we recognize? Aging, lost dreams, lost youth?

Whatever, in "Sweet Bird" Williams is mostly on track, structurally self-indulgent and demanding much from his stage designer (Derek McClane) who makes dramatic use of the opulent space.

The period is evoked; the humid South is alarmingly present, full of social and racial conflicts. Even the variety of Southern drawls seem consistent, varied in the social levels of the characters.

And most amazing is that although Chance is a warped and distorted atrocity, as presented, at the end one does feel pity - not for his self-pity but for his very real and terrifying plight.

This play contains some of the most convincing acting I have seen this summer. The characters were terrifyingly real despite being hard to love.

Director David Jones has seen to it that Williams is still being honored and presented boldly at Williamstown.

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