Dana Berger, Ian Merrigan, and Lisa Reynolds in Tennessee Williams’s This is the Peaceable Kingdom, performed at the Bushwick Starr. — Photo by Paul Cox
Explorations of the least known works of best known playwrights are odd affairs. In mining the past for things overlooked, is there something special about these forgotten scraps over, say, the best works of more obscure figures? Do great playwrights necessarily leave traces of greatness in everything they write? Or is this perennial interest part of a cult of celebrity, fixated on the immortals of high school drama class even in their least distinguished moments?
Tennessee Williams is one such immortal with a large and scattered legacy of plays, not every one a Streetcar Named Desire or Glass Menagerie. For three weeks, Brooklyn’s Target Margin Theater are establishing a laboratory at the Bushwick Starr to try to make something of obscurities from throughout Williams’s career, aiming to bring to light a more experimental streak in the old Broadway (and Hollywood) favorite. What makes The Unknown Williams most intriguing, perhaps, is that not a one of these plays has been performed in New York City before.
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The laboratory is divided between one-act plays and collections of shorts, paired into consecutive sessions on most nights and very much geared towards the stalwarts who want to catch as much of the series as possible. We took in a full evening of three shorts and one play, remarkably spanning six decades. The first performed was from somewhere in the middle, the 1950s, a rather silly “lyrical fantasy” called The Case of the Crushed Petunias. The lighthearted plot, about a shopkeeper in prim-and-proper Massachusetts whose routine and flowerbed are disrupted by a salesman from Life, Inc., left no room for the famous Williams naturalism, and the actors responded with cartoonish abandon. The short did, nonetheless, deal with the playwright’s ever-present themes of entrapment and escape, keeping it tied to his oeuvre if only as Tennessee Williams: The Animated Series.
The transition to the second short was unfortunately abrupt, as the audience left the (suddenly less objectionable) metaphorical prison of Dorothy Simple’s Massachusetts existence for a much more substantial prison in the deep south. In Escape, the tone took a dive into the bleak as three chain gang prisoners sat waiting in a cell while an unseen fourth made a bid for the Cannonball and freedom. The tension hinged on offstage sounds – dogs, train whistles, gunshots – while the sketch was drawn with economy through gritty argot and pure sweat.
The third short piece dug right back to the beginning of Williams’s career, in fact to his early college days of 1935. The character sketch Why Do You Smoke So Much, Lily? is college work through and through, sullen and anguished and not especially satisfying. At the risk of giving it away, Lily smokes so much because she’s an intellectual and hates her stifling mother. This makes her the first of many such women to follow, the real point of interest here for Williams followers. Smoke she did in the play, at least half a dozen cigarettes straight through, and the clouds of smoke more than the clever multimedia effects or her angry performance formed the sketch’s atmosphere.
Less than an hour later we returned for the meat of the evening, the 1980 one-act play This is the Peaceable Kingdom. Set in a nursing home in Queens and dwelling on death, it’s no surprise that this is a late work, written just a few years before Williams’s end. What is surprising is to see the play performed here in Bushwick, bastion of youth that it increasingly is. We all have parents and grandparents, though, and fears over the dissolution of family are as rampant now as in the 80s. The same preoccupations that made Up such a successful tear-jerker for Pixar were stoked here, but to far less heartwarming ends. The script is confidently experimental, filled with mysterious voices and portents, yet remained grounded in colorful, funny characters.
It was the characters who won out in the first round of the laboratory, and here it became obvious why Williams, as one of the 20th century’s great character writers, is deserving of further exploration. Each of Target Margin’s actors was able to take on a role without having to contend with the legacy of a Vivien Leigh or a Marlon Brando. This allowed them to take Williams’ characters of their own and animate them as they saw fit. This is the sort of free experimentation that our neighborhood welcomes, and we recommend catching some more of it in the coming weeks.
