New Play, Old Play

Orpheus Descending is a rewrite by Tennessee Williams of a Williams play, Battle of Angels, that headed for Broadway in 1940 but folded in Boston. A certain sense of remodeling, of altered stairs and corridors, of trapdoors inserted and windows removed, hangs over the play. But the builder's identity, whatever the stage or the style of construction, is never in doubt. Williams writes of life in a backward, bigoted Southern town, and of a young guitar-playing itinerant who arrives there. He becomes involved with its unhappy women, and as a result with its unreasoning men, to be chewed to death at last by its chain-gang bloodhounds. More intensively--amid daffy old ladies, a nymphomaniac outcast, knife-flashing bullies and gun-toting racists--it tells of the young man's affair with a woman whose Italian father was burned to death by a mob, and whose husband helped burn him. Symbols of lostness and loneliness, they become victims of corruption and brutality.

At one point or another, Orpheus Descending achieves everything that Tennessee Williams does well and even does uniquely: whiplashing recrimination, harshly funny humor, the corrosive bite of evil, the shaking fingers of fright. Actress Maureen Stapleton has some extraordinary moments as the wife, Cliff Robertson some quietly effective ones as the guitar player. But, taken as a whole, the play fails, and for three reasons: a faultiness of structure, an obsessiveness of attitude, an empurpling theatricalism.

In Williams' attempt at a kind of outer and inner story--in his ferocious portrayal of a whole community's lynch-law intolerances that encircles his sordid, tense, sometimes maudlin idyl--there is more awry than a certain sprawl and shifting of tone. There is a real lack of causation and of vital connection; the destructive social forces never bear down honestly or even credibly on the personal tale. But here it is the social critic who helps lead the craftsman astray--the Williams who is obsessed with violence, corruption and sex, who sees life through a cracked glass darkly, and who at the end--exactly as the cavalry were once summoned to the rescue --brings on hoodlums for the kill.

It is hard, finally, to isolate material from method, the world's violence from Williams' own, because of the garish orchestrating of his protest, the sheer fireworks of his pessimism. Talent as vivid as Williams' is often as lopsided; few highly personal visions of life are notably panoramic. What tells against Orpheus Descending is less something limited than something lurid; what vitiates the play, even as it animates it, is so canny a theater sense. It is the stage's melodrama, not the world's malevolence, that consistently wears its heartlessness on its sleeve.

The Duchess of Malfl (by John Webster), one of the most famous of Elizabethan dramas, is in stage terms one of the most taxing. As sheer drama, it has far less beat and drive than Webster's own less celebrated White Devil. Its plot lacks supple movement almost more than it does ample motives; its characters are rarely so grand as Shakespeare's and never so human. The story, of a rich widowed young Duchess (Jacqueline Brookes) who secretly remarries against her greedy brothers' will, to be stalked by them and finally done to death, bursts fully into flame only in scattered scenes. Where Webster scores oftener is as a merchant of horrors and a master of atmosphere.

The Phoenix Theater's Duchess, fogging the plot all the more by cutting the play, does best with the horrors. But the production has no deepening atmosphere: its night-lit scenes lack something damned and haunted, dreamlike and vast; horror never widens into terror. The reason often lies in the very method, in mounting The Duchess in a kind of modern dress, blackshirts and all, and in Director Jack Landau's stressing, in print, the "modernity" of the play. But whatever grim horrors an age of violence has imposed on the modern world offer too little sanction; for about Webster's own Elizabethan world there is nothing modern whatsoever; if anything, it looks backward to the Middle Ages.

The Duchess has been carefully staged, but where it succeeds most in effect--as Grand Guignol--it stands forth least in stature. "I am Duchess of Malfi still!" cries the bedeviled but undaunted heroine: the Phoenix production, despite its good points, can hardly say as much.

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