Bad Case of the Fantods

By T. E. Kalem

THE ECCENTRICITIES OF A NIGHTINGALE

by TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

Tennessee Williams' favorite play doctor for his ailing plays is Tennessee Williams. He gives them scene transplants or amputates a character or administers dialogue transfusions, but somehow these measures never restore these dramas to robust health.

Virtually no one alive saw his first play. Battle of Angels, since it closed during its Boston tryout in 1940, but when it reappeared as Orpheus Descending in 1957, it was not really worth seeing. The Milk Train Doesn 't Stop Here Any More was not a completely negligible drama on its first New York showing in 1963, but its doctored version one year later was comatose. Now Williams has given Summer and Smoke a kind of coronary bypass, but the patient looks pale.

In a peculiar way, Summer and Smoke's original weakness was its strength. It posed a diagrammatic, didactic confrontation between Alma Winemiller, representing Soul (alma is the Spanish word for soul), and John Buchanan Jr., the hell-raising son of the doctor next door, representing Body. In its somewhat dogmatic way, this conflict exemplified the central tension in Williams' work between the flesh and the spirit, which makes him an extremely Protestant writer. The late great theologian, Paul Tillich, regarded Williams as a Christian existentialist.

Mama's Boy. In Eccentricities of a Nightingale, Alma (Betsy Palmer) does not repress or sublimate her passion for John (David Selby), but her relatively outspoken attempts to seduce him are fluttery and amateurish. John, on the other hand, has been turned into a too-decent-by-half mama's boy. He has lost his father in this reincarnation and gained a naggingly intrusive, oppressively possessive mother (Nan Martin).

This time around the characters are not even wooden--just beaverboard. With one exception. As Alma, Betsy Palmer gives a performance that is touching and precise as a girl with a bad case of the fantods, erotic in the generosity of proffered and unrequited love, and radiant in the intensity of the deepest human feelings. T. E. K.

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