Apparitions and Cakewalkers

By T.E. Kalem

WILL MR. MERRI WETHER RETURN FROM MEMPHIS? by Tennessee Williams

Cities usually have mayors, but Key West, Fla., has a king--Tennessee Williams. On Jan. 24 the king, who has maintained a home on this southernmost tip of the continental U.S. since 1949, was in his reigning glory. The freshly completed $3.5 million Tennessee Williams Fine Arts Center, a unit of Florida Keys Community College, was dedicated; the day was officially proclaimed Tennessee Williams Day. His previously unproduced play, Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis?, was given its world premiere. After the curtain dropped, a bash ensued in the theater lobby, complete with torrents of champagne and the sound of jazz classics rendered by the Basin Street Band, flown in from New Orleans for the occasion. A man without peer among living dramatists deserves no less, and he was a warm and affable guest of honor.

The new center, which also has facilities for art and film, is adjacent to the college and blends in admirably with it. The theater, which seats 492 people, is comfortable and intimate. It has been decorated in earth colors: beige, rust, burnt orange. In contrast, the ceiling consists of dramatically large black and white alternating panels.

This is a theater, possibly unique, that can convert mechanically from proscenium to theater-in-the-round staging. To switch from conventional to arena staging, the first 100 seats in the center of the orchestra can be removed (manually) and placed on bleachers on the regular stage. Giant plates under the right and left orchestra sections swivel those seats around so that they now face each other over an intervening gap. That gap is filled when hydraulic jackets lift a new stage floor. The result is a circle-in-the-square, with seats on all four sides. For students of theater, this double capability is particularly valuable: they can learn about the effects of space and location as applied to different sorts of plays.

Tennessee Williams wrote Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis? in 1969, when he was mourning the death of his friend Frank Merlo. Despite numerous freshets of humor, an undertow of grief runs through the drama. Williams put the play away for a decade. With the opening of the fine arts center bearing his name, he felt it was best to inaugurate the theater with a work no one had seen.

Among Williams' works, this play most nearly resembles Camino Real. But it is more pensive and muted, a violin to Camino Real's trumpet. Like Camino Real, Mr. Merriwether laces together reality and fantasy, the romantic spirit and the appearance of actual culture heroes of the past, such as Van Gogh and Rimbaud, here presented as "apparitions." In episodic fashion, Mr. Merriwether embraces the four major concerns that have spurred Williams' dramatic imagination: loneliness, love, the violated heart and the valiancy of survival.

There are three central characters: Louise (Roxana Stuart), a genteel widow; Nora (Naomi Riseman), a widow of lower-class origins; and Louise's teen-age daughter Gloria (Melissa Leo). They live in Bethesda, Miss., at the turn of the century. In her widowhood Louise has taken a younger man, Mr. Merriwether (David Williams) as a lover, but he has left for a job in Memphis. She is desolate and yearns for his return. There are hints of Blanche DuBois in her, and white is the dominant color of the play. The set is white except for a square black aperture through which the apparitions enter.

While Louise is given to poignant reflections, her constant visitor, Nora, is a bearer of upside-down cake and earthy common sense. They are bound together by unutterable aloneness, and they summon up the apparitions with a brief incantation about eternally unresting souls in order to have someone further to talk to. But after the apparitions have told their sad stories, the widows are chilled through their bones.

Louise's real-life worry is her daughter, who has reached the dreamy transition from girl to woman. Gloria shows touches of Alma from Summer and Smoke. Her full-length dresses seem like veils, of which the seventh is soon to drop. She goes to the library, attracting boys who would never open a book. "Beware of early fire," warns her mother. Fire is kindled when she meets a "romantically handsome youth" (Arnie Burton), who seems virginal beyond belief. Gloria talks to him of love in a tenderly erotic scene and does a dance of sexual awakening.

Later, a troupe of dancers and singers comes onstage and does a cakewalk to the accompaniment of a ragtime banjo. This is fun and lightens the darker moments, but it is a trifle deceptive. Williams has always been a master at utilizing period music to invoke memories of happier times and the certainty of loss. Director William Prosser makes sensitive contact with the inner spirit of the play, and, considering that the company is a mix of amateurs and professionals, the result is creditable. The indisputable triumph belongs to the citizens of Key West, who gave selfless hours and years of effort to build this arts center and who will now be repaid in something sweeter than sweat or money.

--T.E.Kalem

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