Courtesy of the Midnight Company
“I think I was haunted today by his ghost,” confides a droll Sarah Whitney, associate director of the Midnight Company and director of Tennessee Williams’s The Two-Character Play, opening May 11 at the historic Mummers Theatre in the Central West End. “I was sitting alone in the audience and I heard the floor right behind me creak…I thought, ‘There you go, Tennessee. Hope you like what we’re doing!’”
A relevant query: would Tennessee, whose tempestuous relationship to St. Louis is the stuff of legend (and no shortage of mention in academic circles), approve of the matter? This is the same man who once dubbed the city “St. Pollution,” after all. With or without his phantom consent, the inaugural Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis—a five-day series of plays, readings, and lectures from May 11–15—pays tribute to the poet, playwright, and pained dipsomaniac.
“Something about this play lends itself to a theatre that’s less pristine,” says Whitney of Two-Character, a script Williams labored on longer than any other. “It’s one of the densest plays I’ve ever worked on.” The Mummers Theatre is itself a relic of vintage Williams; in 1936 and 1937, three of his plays, Headlines, Candles to the Sun, and The Fugitive Kind, debuted on its stage.
“Like Southern-fried Beckett,” as Joseph Hanrahan, who plays Felice, pithily puts it, Two-Character reflects a pivotal shift in the playwright’s career. “[Williams] worked on the play for 10 years. Both the thinking and work that went into it are very manufactured—equal heavy amounts of both his own Southern orientation as a writer, and this new, modern abstract sensibility.”
Michelle Hand, who plays Clare in the play (and who received her first Kevin-Kline nom for her role as Stella in Streetcar Named Desire), also stresses Two-Character’s experimental thrust. “It’s total theatre—he goes so much into the surreal bent that some of the class stuff that typifies his other work goes away. He gets at the stuff that holds us together—the nasty stuff that holds us together, but also the transcendent stuff that holds us together.”
Born Thomas Lanier Williams, “Tennessee” was no stranger to contradiction. As a young man in St. Louis, he buddied up with some of the city’s most charismatic—and controversial—leftist creatives: painter Joe Jones (whose work hangs in both the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Kemper), radical writer Jack Conroy, and proletariat poet Josephine Johnson, to name a few. Meandering the delightfully tetanus-friendly obstacle courses of the present-day City Museum, it might be easy to forget it was once a shoe factory—the same Depression-era edifice in which Tennessee and his father toiled for years, the reason that the Williams family left rural Mississippi for the bustling metropolis of St. Louis. And driving down Taylor, past Westminster, in the Central West End, Mummers Theatre (currently inhabited The Learning Center, an educational nonprofit) might seem just another tony residence. But St. Louis is, if anything, a haunted place, and as such the perfect space to celebrate a very haunted man.
That is, no matter how shiny his Delmar star, Williams’s relationship to this city was no less stormy than those that typify his plays. “At its most basic level,” explains Hand, “Two-Character is about a brother and sister, and how they’re negotiating getting what they need from each other—needs connected by blood, history, and everything else.”
“What makes it so St. Louis,” says Whitney, “is you have these two people who want to be something more, and you have this city where so often people feel as though they could be something more, but can’t do so in the city.” But like so many literary greats with a complicated connection to our town—among them, T.S. Eliot, Sara Teasdale, Maya Angelou—it is no less true that some of their greatness was of our town as well, haunting its corridors, lobbies, and stages long after these legends had passed, or moved, on.
To witness Tennessee resurrected in such a context feels at once audacious and elegiac—in keeping with an especially plangent exchange toward the end of The Two-Character Play. “When are we going home?” Clare asks her brother. “Clare,” he responds, “our home is a theater anywhere that there is one.”
Performances of The Two-Character Play go on Wednesday and Thursday, May 11 & 12 at 7:30 p.m.; Friday, May 13 at 8 p.m.; and Saturday and Sunday, May 14 & 15, at 3 p.m. The historic Mummers Theatre is located at 4504 Westminster (at Taylor), in the Central West End. Tickets are available at metrotix.com; for more information visit the Tennessee Williams Festival site, twstl.org.
