Sweet Bird of Youth (review)

The sex and sin of Tennessee Williams's plays were—until the breakup of the USSR—either banned by prudish censors or diluted by jittery translators. Despite this, Williams has been a popular playwright, and today the repertoire of Moscow theatres includes not only his best-known works—The Glass Menagerie, The Rose Tattoo, and A Streetcar Named Desire—but also Williams's experiments in language, character, and form—Small Craft Warnings, The Two Character Play, and A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot. Audiences and artists are returning to the plays with fresh expectations and excitement now that new translations and productions have restored the playwright's corporeal concerns.

At Moscow's Sovremennik Theatre, the young iconoclast Kiril Serebrennikov has staged an athletic and visually arresting production of Sweet Bird of Youth (). Serebrennikov mines the darkest and most violent aspects of the play, transforming Williams's parable into a ritualistic tragedy. An explosive and hypnotic performance by the diva Marina Neyalova makes this Sweet Bird of Youth a compelling event.

Adapted by poet Nina Sadur, Serebrennikov's production is blatantly theatrical: offstage characters look on from the sides, choreographed movement sequences abound, and an onstage cello player underscores much of the early action. Designed by Nikolai Simonov, the set resembles a Santa Fe motel more than the grand hotel of a Gulf Coast town suggested in the original text. The design is rendered rather simply and abstractly with few props, thereby forcing the actors to move pieces of furniture as needed.

In Sadur's prologue, three women—one ostensibly the mother of the itinerant gigolo, Chance Wayne—give birth to the story about to unfold. These strange creatures herald the doom that awaits Chance (Yuri Kolokolnikov) at the end of the play and alert us to Serebrennikov's scheme: though Time is the Enemy (says Williams), it is circular, and hence these events can be predicted and enacted as rituals. The setting is, we learn, not a hotel but an asylum for the aged, from which these Weird Sisters eventually move to inhabit Williams's play as townspeople, hecklers, and, at the very end, grotesque bacchantes ready to castrate and devour the sacrificial Chance.

This self-conscious enacting of rituals and of role-playing dominates the production. Serebrennikov takes his cue from Williams's occasional use of direct address and expands it to all aspects of his interpretation. Onstage, the three women don grotesque fat suits, which are covered at first by hospital garb and later by other costumes. A seductive and violent dance—of a corps of thugs dressed in almost identical suits and ties—introduces us to Boss Finley's entourage. Simple plywood laid across saw horses serves as Finley's podium. The characters in the scenes acknowledge the onstage cellist.

The most interesting aspect of the production is the dual performance of Marina Neyalova as Princess Kosmonopolis (a.k.a. the aging star Alexandra Del Lago) and the young Heavenly Finley, Chance's onetime lover. It is an extraordinary display of emotional highs and lows, of unexpected turns and athletic choreography, by a star of the Russian stage. As the Princess, Neyalova uses the bed—the only real piece of furniture in the first scene—as trampoline and stage, as the place for lovemaking and wrestling. The entire Princess/Chance scene is an extended pas de deux of sensual acrobatics, revealing the Princess to be strong, changeable, violent, and, at times, gentle and wise. At several points, a large circle flies in from above, suspended in the air and outlined by bare bulbs. When dark, it is an ominous suggestion of a clock or wheel of fate; when lit, it serves as the marquee lights for Kosmonopolis's bedroom performance.