Women Alone

By T. E. Kalem

CREVE COEUR by Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams was lionized this past week at the second annual Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in Charleston, S.C., but there was more to it than celebrity worship. Williams was on the receiving end of a wave length of personal affection that surely extends far beyond Charleston. It is not difficult to guess why. Over many years, and in all of his plays, Williams has brought to his characters, who are wounded in heart and bruised in spirit, the healing hands of a dramatic poet of great compassion.

That compassion is evident once again in his newest work, Creve Coeur. Unfortunately, some of the gifts that have made Williams such a formidable dramatist are sadly in abeyance. The pulse of conflict beats feebly. The surge of musical eloquence, which was once like a river cresting in flood, is in Creve Coeur little more than a ripple on a placid pond.

While the play might qualify as tragicomedy, it is more closely related to "life's little ironies." The locale is St. Louis in the mid-'30s, though that means more in attitude than in geography. The plot is bare-bones simple. Dorothea (Shirley Knight) is a blonde schoolteacher who has read the handwriting on the blackboard. She is spooked by incipient spinsterhood. A recent brief liaison with the school principal, a flighty socialite named Ralph T. Ellis, has lodged the romantic hope in her mind that she is his intended. Bodey (Jan

Miner), her best friend and a kind of Falstaffian mother-hen realist, knows better, partly because she has read the morning society news announcing Ellis' fiancee. It is not Dorothea.

Bodey hides the paper to spare Dorothea, but she cannot, of course, hide it from the audience-- thereby spiking any hope of dramatic surprise. The second act brings in the bad-news girl, Dorothea's fellow teacher Helena. Helena (Charlotte Moore) is an antiseptic snob with faintly lesbian leanings who wants Dorothea to abandon her tacky flat and move in with her. Formerly tempted, Dorothea now refuses. The poignance of the situation is that these are women alone, who at best are merely pooling their losses.

Yet humor salvages their plight. Some of it is sheer vaudevillian antics -- Dorothea doing body-wrenching calisthenics in her negligee, the half-deaf Bodey fidding with her hearing aid and trying to camouflage it with an outlandish flower, or Miss Gluck (Barbara Tarbuck), on whom coffee acts as an emetic, rushing to the bathroom to throw up. But more of the comedy springs from Williams' absurdist juxtapositions and mocking putdowns.

With the actresses he has at his disposal, Williams does not have to send in the Marines. Like a magnifying glass, Knight can turn a role into a pinpoint of fire. With glares, hand signals and gusto, Miner kneads her part like the earthy dough of life, and if there is such a thing as cancer of the temperament, Moore displays a terminal case.

The theme of Creve Coeur, finally, is valor. Toward the end of the play, Dorothea says, "We must pull ourselves together and go on, go on -- that's all life seems to offer or demand." That has always been Tennessee Williams' credo, and he is scarcely likely to abandon it now now.

-- T.E.Kalem

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