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Casting is a
curious affair. That’s an apt word, affair, because what directors
ultimately want is to fall in love with the actors they cast, or more
accurately, the director wants to fall in love with the actor in the
role, as in, “I love you in this role.” I was able to say exactly that
quite recently when directing Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke
at Villanova Theatre, especially regarding the actress in the role of
Miss Alma, the female lead. For months prior to auditions, I had thought
to cast a different woman as Miss Alma. I was, in fact, set on a
different woman, but then Elizabeth Pool came to the audition and
instantly there emerged a sense of, “Oh, Miss Alma has arrived,” or, “An
actress with the sensibility of a Tennessee Williams neurotic, somehow
Victorian but covertly sensual, Southern heroine has arrived.” Still, I
tried to cast the original woman, so ingrained was my predisposition and
fealty to her (we had worked together before), but it became apparent to
everyone at the call-backs – the producer, the dramaturge, the costume
designer, the production manager, and me – that Elizabeth was nailing
the affect of Miss Alma, and so I cast her. But an audition is not the
performance. Over the course of rehearsals, Elizabeth struggled with the
role, and why not? Our milieu was after all the world of Tennessee
Williams, which came to reveal itself as fairly bottomless in terms of
mining the script. Nevertheless what Elizabeth was struggling with was
not so much the depth of the play as the fragility of Miss Alma.
Elizabeth is a tall woman who takes long and vigorous strides and swings
her arms. The way she tends to use her body was distorting the
interpretation, making Miss Alma seem staunch and robust, as if she were
a survivor, which she isn’t. Miss Alma is in the tradition of Amanda,
Laura, Blanche, Lady, and many more in the panoply of Williams’
characters that have spiritual and creative strengths but are less than
stalwart physically and psychologically. These non-robust Williams women
(and sometimes men) are repressed in body and fragile in psychology.
They are aesthetic and somehow delicate. They espouse fading ideals that
sound out of touch with the contemporary world. Generally, they go
under. Elizabeth did not find the quality of “I am capable of going
under” until the final dress rehearsal, two nights before opening (which
became of course the night I fell in love with her in the role). Prior
to that she had been giving an intelligent performance but it wasn’t
precisely Tennessee Williams. I had been working so hard over the weeks
and so had she, and I was about to settle for what she was delivering,
but then my set designer, Hiroshi Iwasaki, who always pushes me at the
eleventh hour, insisted that I could get Elizabeth to get the real
performance.
On opening night I worried that in
finding Miss Alma, Elizabeth may have taken on the character’s
ultra-sensitivity. It’s a dilemma for the actor, isn’t it? There is the
need to become pervious but then one walks around with an open heart.
But never mind, because a sad and tender heart is good for working in
the theatre. Also good is not resisting the slings and arrows that
permeate one’s sad and tender heart.
Isn’t this the very crux and lesson of
Tennessee Williams? Isn’t he devoted to revealing the lives of
ultra-sensitive people – the unconventional, the outcasts, the
fugitives, the lost, the confused, and the creative – who reach out and
get hurt? Do you recall the very first words said to Blanche DuBois in
A Streetcar named Desire: “What’s the matter, honey? Are you
lost?” Life is terribly difficult for Tennessee Williams’
ultra-sensitive characters. The very first line said by Miss Alma in
Summer and Smoke is, “Open my bag, Father. My fingers have frozen
stiff,” and that on the 4th of July in Mississippi! How they
deal with their difficulties makes us laugh at these characters. Miss
Alma is aquiver with affectations and idealizations. They are extreme
people and they try to contend with characters that are their antitheses
in extremity: sexual powerhouses like John Buchanan of Summer and
Smoke or Stanley Kowalski of Streetcar who are on the move
and on the rise. The ultra-sensitive of Williams end up defeated, and
then they don’t seem so funny anymore. Or, as Stella Adler put it, “They
run from the monster of brute America, commercial America, and they get
leveled.”
Arthur Miller has located and defined
the drama in Tennessee Williams: “People lose greatly in the very shadow
of the mountain from whose peak they might have had a clear view of God.
[His theme] is the romance of the lost yet sacred misfits, who exist in
order to remind us of our trampled instincts, our forsaken tenderness,
the holiness of the spirit of man.” Williams’ intention is not
ideological but evocative, to evoke compassion. Harold Clurman has
written, “It is the ‘peculiar people,’ the unprotected, the innocently
sincere, the injured, the estranged, the queer, the defenseless, the
abandoned, and the maimed who Williams redeems for us by his
compassion.” That is the entire view and point of Williams: because of
their suffering, all human beings, misfits included, perhaps misfits
most of all, warrant our compassion.
Looking back, I can see that what had
been inhibiting Elizabeth from capturing the fullness of Miss Alma was a
hesitancy to acknowledge, and identify with, the fractured aspect of her
character. By the end of the play, Miss Alma is regularly taking pills
to get by. On the day before the final dress rehearsal, Elizabeth wanted
me to change the line, “Do you remember those little white tablets you
gave me? I’ve used them all up and I’d like to have some more.” She
wanted simply to ask for a prescription refill or for pills, so that
Miss Alma wouldn’t seem so much of a druggie. My answer was that the
playwright, who became addicted to medication, knew what he was doing
and knew what he wanted when he wrote, “little white tablets.” There is
no way around it: Miss Alma has succumbed to pain-relief. She says, in
the last scene, concerning the prescription number of her tablets, “I
think of it as the telephone number of God!” When I explained to
Elizabeth why I wouldn’t change the line, something shifted in her – she
accepted Miss Alma, drugs and all -- and the result was that her
performance changed. (I would say that she let Miss Alma’s suffering
touch her own sad and tender heart.) On the next night, one night short
of opening, Elizabeth resisted the temptation to cross the stage with
alacrity. She slowed her body down and reigned in her gestures and she
vivified her speech entirely. She aspired to something delicate and
utterly eccentric in the role. Outside and in, she found a Williams’
wounded woman.
Tennessee Williams wrote that Miss Alma
was his favorite character because both he and she came out late. He
came out in his twenties in the French Quarter of New Orleans. She comes
out before our eyes in the last scene of Summer and Smoke,
meeting a traveling salesman, with whom she will go to Moon Lake Casino
and with whom she will undoubtedly lose her virginity. But afterwards,
what then? With New Orleans, Thomas Lanier Williams became Tennessee
Williams, playwright, and forever we are grateful. For Alma Winemiller,
the time is 1916 in Glorious Hill, Mississippi, she is a minister’s
daughter, is without a career, is perhaps 28 years old, has just been
unequivocally rejected by John Buchanan whom she’s lived next door to
and loved all her life, and she depends upon little white tablets.
What’s next for her? Nothing more or less, it would seem, than our
compassion.
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