[TGE-mail] Stray Dog Theatre @ Tower Grove Abbey Great Reviews!

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RFT / Food for Thought  
May we suggest Suddenly Last Summer at the Tower Grove Abbey: You'll  eat it 
up!


By _Dennis  Brown_ 
(http://www.riverfronttimes.com/feedback/index.php?author_email=&headline=Food for Thought&issuedate=2007-09-12)   
Published: September 12, 2007 
 
Fear and loathing stalk the stage at the Tower Grove Abbey, where Stray Dog  
Theatre has taken residence. Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last  Summer is a 
war of words. They are among the most evocative, sensuous  and tactile words 
that America's premier lyric dramatist ever wrote. By the time  this engrossing 
moral fable reaches its incredulous climax, Williams' sculpted,  chiseled prose 
has exposed us to a fantastical world where madness is lonelier  than death.  
Tennessee was in a bad way when he wrote Suddenly Last Summer. The  critical 
ravaging of his preceding effort, Orpheus Descending, had sent  him into 
psychoanalysis. As a form of therapy, almost as if in a vain attempt to  rewrite 
his tortured family history, in a rush he composed this intensely  personal 
one-act whose genesis was his sister Rose's lobotomy in 1943. Williams,  who was 
not informed of that surgery until after the deed was done, used this  play as 
an opportunity to relive the moment of decision: To cut or not to cut,  that 
is the question.  
In New Orleans in 1936, the unctuously tyrannical Violet Venable (a stand-in  
for Williams' mother Edwina) is determined to lobotomize Catharine, her  
Cassandra-like niece (Rose). What is Catharine's sin? She's telling this  shocking 
and slanderous story about how last summer, while on vacation with  Violet's 
son Sebastian in Cabesa de Lobo (double entendre, anyone?), Sebastian  met a 
most sudden and horrid death. He was, in fact, cannibalized.  
The unseen Sebastian is the third principal character, a surrogate for  
Williams himself. There has been precious little dissembling here. Sebastian is  a 
peripatetic poet who yearned for fame after death "when it couldn't disturb  
him." (Williams took greater pride in his poetry than in his plays.) Charming,  
brilliant and scarifying, Sebastian was a user and a taker, a gay blade who  
could toss aside friends and relatives as easily as he might flick cigarette  
ashes from his lapel. The metaphor of Sebastian's having been devoured alludes 
 to the critics' savaging of Orpheus Descending.  
This lucid Stray Dog production, which has been directed by Gary F. Bell, is  
remarkably effective at revealing the many layers of Williams' nightmarish  
world. Although the script has a cast of seven (and there's good work here by  
Liz Hopefl as Catharine's flighty mother and Rusty Gunther as her dense  
brother), essentially the story is a duel to the death between Violet and  
Catharine.  
Nancy Lewis' portrait of Mrs. Venable is mesmerizing. For her, hatred is a  
life-sustaining passion, a reason to go on living. Williams' stage directions  
instruct Mrs. Venable to gulp her medicine. Lewis instead ingests it slowly, 
as  if taking a sacrament. Loathing is her religion. She is a force to be 
feared,  and Julie Layton's Catharine is duly terrified. Eyes vacant and lower lip  
practically bit through, Layton resembles a fraying nerve end. She has found  
Catharine in the almost-throwaway line, "I got panicky, Mother." We see the  
cancerous fear that infects her.  
The referee in this joust is the doctor (Joshua Thomas) who is to perform the 
 operation. Alas, Williams has no interest in this character, perhaps because 
he  never knew the real doctor. Williams only cares about Rose, perhaps the 
only  person he ever loved unconditionally. Was there a specific day in 1943 
when Rose  was told she was going to have a lobotomy? If so, how did she react? 
It's surely  a moment Tennessee dramatized in his mind countless times, and he 
wrote about it  here. By the end of this brief but harrowing evening, 
Catharine (like A  Streetcar Named Desire's equally put-upon Blanche) is dependent on 
the  kindness of strangers. It's a kindness Rose was denied. But in art — 
which, as  Sebastian reminds us, can be a search for God — mere mortals can play 
god, and  even resurrection is possible.  
Details:
Through September 22 at the Tower Grove Abbey, 2336 Tennessee Avenue.  
Tickets are $18 ($15 for students and seniors). Call 314-865-1995 or visit 
_www.straydogtheatre.org_ (http://www.straydogtheatre.org/) . 







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