By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“)
While the Tennessee Williams New Orleans Literary Festival has ended this year’s presentations and its famed Scholars Conference, serious study of the playwright’s early work abounds in Outraged Hearts, the production being helmed by The Fire Weeds, a new, female-centric production company in New Orleans.
The two one-acts, The Pretty Trap and Interior: Panic eventually became incorporated into two of his better known pieces, The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire.
The two principal artistic directors Jaclyn Bethany and Lin Gathright also served as principal actors in the works for the nascent company. In The Pretty Trap, we see Bethany take on the role of Laura Wingfield as first imagined by the playwright, a sexually aggressive, argumentative young woman, who feels trapped by her mother Amanda, played by Gathright.
While Laura is depicted as far from the shy, quiet and introverted creature we eventually see in The Glass Menagerie, the playwright elects to give her a great deal more dialog. The dynamic between mother and daughter is more pronounced than we see in Menagerie. There is also a great deal more spoken by the “gentleman caller” given the name Jim Delaney and played charmingly by George Copeland. Williams would eventually change his surname to O’Connor in the later iteration.
An interesting early choice Williams made in The Pretty Trap was not to use Tom as the narrator. This is not “the memory play,” that Tom calls it in the final, larger work we find in The Glass Menagerie. Ross Michael Pasquale is seen in traditional whiteface as a mime, an interesting choice, but one that could easily be considered disturbing. But given the extent the minor character Tom plays in The Pretty Trap, it is understandable and a less than subtle commentary on the nature of his role in this earlier work.
In Interior: Panic, an early iteration of several scenes that found new life in A Streetcar Named Desire, Gathright plays Blanche Shannon (not Dubois) opposite Bethany as her sister Grace (not Stella) and her husband Jack Keifaber (not Stanley Kowalski), who is played by Pasquale.
Blanche is often seen behind a scrim with projections depicting her imagination running wild as we witness her downward spiral into mental illness. This is much more direct than Blanche Dubois’ eventual breakdown following the rape scene in Streetcar. Indeed, the rape scene is one she foretells in her mind during the course of Interior: Panic.
The Keifabers are deeply in love. They spend many moments cuddling and embracing whenever Jack is at home alone with his already apparently pregnant wife. But these moments are offset by the wild machinations of Blanche’s mind where we hear her inner thoughts and fears expressed through lighting and sound effects.
The immersive experience of Outraged Hearts takes place in three separate performance spaces within Big Couch, the St. Claude home to many improv works in the Bywater. Actors perform in character at the bar for several minutes before the audience is ushered into the largest of the rooms for The Pretty Trap. The audience returns to the bar for intermission only to be ushered into a smaller room for the final presentation of Interior: Panic a few minutes later.
Anyone who knows the final works of both The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire will appreciate these earlier attempts by Williams. We can gain some understanding as to how he took chances in depicting and eventually refining his characters. But for the very few who have never seen any of his better known works, these two one act plays can be enjoyed on their own as more than simple curiosities.
For those that are more informed, watching these two early works gives insight into how radically different these characters were spun before being committed to his final drafts, which were undoubtedly shaped by the directors for each project and by audience reaction in out-of-town tryouts before reaching Broadway.
Outraged Hearts (1 hour and 35 minutes with a 15-minute intermission) produced by The Fire Weeds contains two one-act plays, The Pretty Trap (45 minutes) and Interior: Panic (25 minutes) continues at Big Couch, 1045 Desire Street, Suite 101, with remaining shows on March 29 and 30 at 7:30 p.m. A Saturday matinee on March 30 will also be held at 2:00 p.m. For tickets, click here.
