“People keep asking me when I am going to write another ’Streetcar Named Desire,’” drawls The Writer (Jeremy Lawrence) with coy petulance in “Five by Tenn.” “I don’t feel like it.”
“Five by Tenn,” an evening of recently discovered and obscure one-act plays by Tennessee Williams, is not “Streetcar,” or even “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” or “Glass Menagerie.” Directed by the Shakespeare Theatre’s Michael Kahn with quickness and lightness that draw out the plays’ humor, the five small plays grant us intriguing insights into Mr. Williams’ development as a writer.
The plays are arranged chronologically, linked by the fey, affected musings of The Writer, who provides many of the program’s entertaining moments. Mr. Williams was a raconteur of the first order, and you find yourself looking forward to the scene changes, when The Writer strolls onstage to deliver some delicious bon mot or literary gossip.
“Five by Tenn” gets off to a raucous start with “These Are the Stairs You Got to Watch,” a world premiere about a teenager’s loss of innocence during his first day as an usher at a once-grand movie palace. The Boy (Hunter Gilmore) gets the skinny from Carl (Thomas Jay Ryan), pushing 30 and still doing a teen’s job.
“This is a dirty place run by a dirty man,” Carl warns, tearing off his faded usher’s uniform so he finally can “get clean.” The one-act combines Keystone Kops-like mayhem, as the patrons try to get into all kinds of trouble in the roped-off balcony, with an overarching tenderness, as expressed in the character of The Boy. Movie reality and real life are eons apart, The Boy learns, shining his flashlight on the forbidden stairs, poised between curiosity and duty.
“Escape,” another world premiere, foreshadows “The Glass Menagerie” with its “sensitive” adolescent, Donald (Cameron Folmar), delicately sparring with his mother, Mrs. Fenway (Joan van Ark), a steel-tipped sparrow of a woman. The heat of their lakeside cabin is nowhere near as stifling as Mrs. Fenway as she both coddles her son and berates him over being “a dreamer, an impractical sort” and warns him that his dream life is about to change.
All Donald wants to do is swim away, which he does as his mother and their ancient maid, Anna (Kathleen Chalfant, scene-stealing as the monosyllabic, bent-over old retainer) watch him recede into the distance with mounting horror.
Miss van Ark is a revelation as Mrs. Fenway, panting with nerves as she paces and fans herself into selfish hysteria.
The third play, “And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens …,” is the campiest offering of the evening, its over-the-top traits leavened by astonishingly good acting by Mr. Folmar, who is outstanding throughout. Candy (Mr. Folmar) is a New Orleans drag queen staring down the barrel of her 35th birthday.
Abandoned by her lover of 18 years, Candy looks for love in all the wrong places — and finds it in Karl (Myk Watford), an abusive and alcoholic seaman. Candy, with her Hollywood negligees and sweetly dopey Japanese clothing and apartment decor, is so coquettishly, desperately accommodating that she breaks your heart. Mr. Folmar moves silkily between masculine and feminine, the gender lines blurred until you are tricked into believing there might be a third sex after all.
The hothouse-flower world of Candy and her fellow queens gives way to a totalitarian regime in “The Municipal Abbatoir,” another world premiere. In this short, brutal play, a lifelong civil servant (Mr. Ryan, wrenching in his passivity) realizes too late that he has lost the ability to think for himself and question authority.
Condemned to certain death at the Municipal Abbatoir, The Clerk might as well be asking directions to the local post office, so focused is he on being prompt. Even the passionate pleadings of a revolutionary (Mr. Folmar) cannot reach him as he plods obediently to his doom.
The final play, “I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow,” is perhaps the most fully realized, a dance of death between two middle-aged friends paralyzed by pain and depression. In the fragmented cadence of the exchanges between One (Miss Chalfant) and Two (Mr. Ryan), you can detect echoes of Pinter and Albee and how much is built into the silences.
Apart, they are incomplete. Together, their bond is forged of need and howling isolation. Although bleak, “Tomorrow” features some of Mr. Williams’ most poetic language, spilling over with lush imagery about a summer lawn filled with white cranes, wine stains on a pristine robe and the creature comforts of a drugstore lunch counter. Then there is One’s gorgeous, agonized speech about “Dragon Country,” the region of “endured but unendurable pain,” where there is “no choice anymore.” Miss Chalfant keenly delivers this speech as if Dragon Country were at her feet, its long and limitless space seducing and terrifying her into action.
With the exception of “Tomorrow,” these are not completed word paintings but vivid, frequently brazen, brush strokes. Mr. Williams was known for loquaciousness — both personally and in his plays — yet “Five by Tenn” shows his command of the compact one-act play form.
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WHAT: “Five by Tenn,” five one-acts by Tennessee Williams
WHERE: Terrace Theater, Kennedy Center
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays, 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Through May 9.
TICKETS: $35 to $60
PHONE: 202/467-4600
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