Los Angeles, California – A guy in a snakeskin jacket, guitar slung across his back, enters a small southern town. He’s looking for something…no, yearning for something. He’s 30 and he’s tired of one-night gigs in bars, too much booze, too many women. He wants something more. This is Tennessee Williams’s parallel to Orpheus, whose music can charm the rocks, descending into Hades to find his beloved wife. As the Greek tale goes, he finds her, is allowed to take her back to life, if he promises not to look back until they are home free. The tragic if. This southern town with its cruel men who warn any black guy to leave town before dark if he wants his life, who burned out the Italian winery owner who served a black, who watched him burn trying to save his little winery, who sold off the man’s daughter to a hateful old storekeeper; the daughter who is stuck, loveless, trapped — a heart filled with a desire for vengeance… How much closer to Hades can you get?

Thwarted passion, human cruelty, inchoate longing — that is the landscape of Tennessee Williams. Translated to film, our finest dramatic actors have played these juicy roles. Marlon Brando played the brutish husband who tips the scales to madness when he seduces his wife’s emotionally tragic sister. Remember that scene with his wife in the hospital delivering their child when he puts on his new pajamas and stands in all his testosterone-y maleness before the cowering Blanche in Streetcar Named Desire? Paul Newman, at his youthful handsomest, thwarted the passion of his wife, Maggie the cat. He’s drunk most of the time with his unresolved guilt about the suicide of his best friend for which he himself was responsible in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Katharine Hepburn tries to bribe the young psychiatrist Montgomery Clift to perform a lobotomy on her beautiful niece Elizabeth Taylor, who claims to have witnessed the mutilation of the old woman’s son, torn to pieces by the poor boys he’s seduced with his money in Suddenly Last Summer. Richard Burton plays the tormented unfrocked priest who seduced an underage girl, now reduced to driving a tour bus of religious ladies, who breaks into a hysteria and only be calmed by a spinster artist traveling with her dying grandfather, a woman who herself has known pain and teaches him the true meaning of acceptance. Sexual hysteria, secrets of the inner heart, violence, redemption. Pure Tennessee. And Orpheus Descending itself done in a film called The Fugitive Kind with a wonderful Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani.

The play was badly received when it was first produced, many times rewritten. Frantic Redhead Productions bravely tackles this long three-acter, and if you have experienced Tennessee Williams only in film and not live onstage — an entirely different experience — this is your chance. This town from hell has its own Greek chorus of noisy, bigoted busybodies who introduce Lady’s predicament, stuck with this old man, dreaming of creating a little wine bar in the back room with flowers and vines, shades of her dead father. Val enters this town in his snakeskin jacket, dreaming of redemption, and who greets him but the town slut, formerly of “good” family, now drunken and ready to seduce the young man who wants nothing to do with her. He’s had enough of her kind. But women take to  this guy, especially the sheriff’s “visionary” wife who paints and loses her eyesight in religious hysteria and, his bad luck, he sort of understands her. So destiny sits laughing: he wants redemption, the lady of the house wants sexual relief (and revenge if she can get it). First act develops the situation: she’s stuck, he needs a job, no good references, but when she sees this body, this face, this guitar, she’s willing to make exceptions.  Second act: she can’t stand it any longer. She wants him. There on the premises, in that little back room. This isn’t going to get him redeemed, but he’s weak and she’s needy. Third act: the town slut warns him — get away and don’t look back.  She knows all, sees all, but you don’t escape the eye of tragedy.  Wife wants her little wine bar, and he’s got to stay and help her manage it. Doom and a powerful violent ending.

Gale Harold does a great guitar guy. On his face, in his manner, a lost soul. He’s never gonna make it. Claudia Mason is excellent. She is that slutty character, voice and figure. Francesca Casle plays the sheriff’s religious wife, to the point. My problem was with a fine actress who played Lady, the frantic, trapped wife. She played her part well, especially in the violent, tragic last act, but to my view,  she was physically miscast. Denise Crosby is fair and rather stolid, more like a capable Midwestern housewife. I was cursed, I suppose, in seeing Anna Magnani playing the trapped daughter of a loving Italian papa who burned to death. Seething. Frantic. Nudge her and she’ll explode. I couldn’t physically see Crosby in that role, although the part was well-played. Also, the townsman who seduced her and refused to marry her when she was pregnant was rather a dry old stick. No heat between them.  Couldn’t see the two of them together. But hey, that was me.  You see the play and you tell me. As it was, the play was was engrossing, moving, and very Tennessee.

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