A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (review)

The latest offering of the Hartford Stage's ten-year Tennessee Williams Marathon, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur(1979), derives from the playwright's post-1961 period when critical and commercial success for Williams's new plays practically vanished. Artistic director Michael Wilson's celebration of Williams's canon alternates between stagings of his best-known works ( Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Night of the Iguana) and those less known ( Now the Cats with Jeweled Claws, The Chalky White Substance), thus exposing his audiences to the multiple styles and motifs that the playwright commanded. Throughout his career, Williams blended realistic and anti-realistic techniques, from the expressionism in A Streetcar Named Desireto the lush symbolism in Suddenly Last Summer. Williams's trend toward anti-realism accelerated during the 1960s in works like The Gnädiges Fräulein, but by the 1970s the playwright returned, with a few exceptions, to the mode of his earlier dramaturgy. Why these later dramas failed might simply be explained by the fact that Williams's works were not ostensibly new anymore. Certainly, the Hartford Stage's Creve Coeurdemonstrates that these late plays offer insight and entertainment to contemporary audiences when one highlights Williams's subtle blending of styles.

Like The Glass Menagerie, the play takes place in St. Louis during the 1930s, but this apartment is far from the dingy claustrophobia of the Wingfield home; it is instead saturated with sunshine and bright colors. The play's plot follows a fairly simple trajectory: single, school teacher Dorothea (Annalee Jefferies) anxiously awaits a Sunday morning telephone call from her boyfriend. Her older roommate Bodey (Carlin Glynn) tries to persuade Dorothea instead to accompany her and her identical twin brother to Creve Coeur Park for a picnic. Meanwhile, the impeccably dressed but brittle Helena (Joan van Ark), Dorothea's colleague at the school, stops by unannounced to press her friend for the first month's rent on a more luxurious apartment that they plan to share together. The practical Bodey and the social-climbing Helena vie for Dorothea's loyalty; when the latter learns near the play's conclusion that her beau is engaged to another woman, she rejects the dreamy idealism represented by Helena and joins Bodey at the park, perhaps to pursue a more realistic love interest.

Loyal to Williams's dramaturgical vision of life's true sorrows and ridiculous absurdities, the actors' performances maintained a delicate and effective balance of conflicting styles, thereby enhancing the comic possibilities of the work. Annalee Jefferies particularly gave a highly nuanced performance, full of pathos for her character. Dorothea reminded me of Blanche DuBois, popping pills and drinking sherry when her nerves overwhelmed her, longing for magic rather than realism. Yet, unlike Blanche, Dorothea is a fully sexualized heroine, unafraid and unashamed of her bodily needs. However, Williams also renders Dorothea in a comic light, as when she performs an exercise and beauty regimen that lasts virtually half the running time of the play. Meanwhile, Joan van Ark turned in an almost camp performance, hissing her words like the snake she's accused of being and strutting about as though she were Blanche DuBois on uppers, the ying to Jefferies's yang. Helena's subtext struck me as a 1930s high-maintenance lesbian, but van Ark wisely did not push this possibility to the extreme. The audience was able to empathize with the characters, but also to laugh at them as Wilson's production quite rightly paid special attention to the play as comedy.

In moments that clearly demonstrated one of Williams's anti-realistic techniques, Bodey's amplified hearing aid whined and whistled loudly, acting like a warning of impending decay and aging. The sound particularly unnerved Helena—Bodey delighted in torturing her with it. In a dress of orange and purple of garish pattern (designed by David C. Woolard), Bodey embodied a domestic matriarch protecting her turf with the help of modern technology, all the while concealing the hearing...