Williams Gone Wild
2 iconoclastic productions breathe new life into Stanley, Blanche and the denizens of 'Vieux Carré'
By Eileen Blumenthal
Imagine the actors' lounge at the Comédie-Française in Paris: crystal chandeliers, Persian rugs and merlot velvet upholstery; marble statues, including a larger-than-life seated Molière; on the walls, gilt-framed portraits we've all seen reproduced in theatre history books. And into the middle of this ancien regime opulence sashays a grinning crocodile. Well, not really. But Lee Breuer is there, in his old sweats, T-shirt, sneakers and blue knit cap, and he is in the process of introducing Tennessee Williams—who was wont to call himself an "old crocodile"—to the Comédie-Française.
It could hardly be a bigger deal if a real croc were sunning itself on one of the velvet settees. Un tramway nommé désir—a gorgeous Streetcar Named Desire created by Breuer and Basil Twist—is the first non-European play to be introduced into the repertoire of the Comédie-Française since Louis XIV decreed the theatre into existence in 1680.
This Streetcar does not bring only 1940s New Orleans into this bastion of Old World culture. It features Japanese sliding screens from a pre-bunraku Japanese puppet tradition; kabuki-type onstage "assistants"; U.S. biker-world accoutrements, including black leather, iconic tattoos and a real motorcycle; and a gender-ambiguous singer crooning and dancing a steamy, autoerotic solo. Alongside these elements, it uses the theatre's crimson-and-gilt stage boxes and centuries-old, hand-cranked Italian Renaissance stage machinery. And in the eye of this scenographic vortex is as moving a portrait of Williams's characters and their relationships as I have ever seen.
Meanwhile, another innovative Williams production, the Wooster Group's Vieux Carré, opened in Los Angeles and New York last season, after some European showings. With the Group's high-tech, precision raucousness and bravura acting, the show confronts the fierce loneliness and eroticism of Williams's 1977 play.
Both productions probably would have delighted Tennessee Williams (if not his estate; see sidebar below). During his last decades, America's greatest playwright struggled mightily—with his own demons, yes, but also with his passion to find a new kind of theatre. Despite critical excoriation, he kept turning out plays that he felt were more poetic and less realistic than the early work that people had gobbled up. And he flirted with trying to get on stage the raw sexuality that had driven many of his short stories and, especially, his memoirs. Williams's earlier plays had treated sex gingerly, acquiescing to the well-behaved mores of 1940s, '50s and '60s stages. By his late years, he hoped some things might have changed. At least now, by his hundredth birthday, some have.
The advent of Tennessee Williams at the Comédie-Française is a love child of actor and director Muriel Mayette, now starting her sixth year as administrateur général (artistic and administrative director) of the troupe—the first woman in its 300-plus-year history to hold that post. "The 20th-century American repertory," Mayette says, "and also work like the Actors Studio's, have had a very notable influence in the 21st century—not only in theatre but through film. It's important to acknowledge and show this influence." Williams, she says, was the obvious playwright to have the first American play ever at the Comédie's historic main space, Salle Richelieu.
And Lee Breuer was her choice to direct it. Mayette knew that Breuer had been reinterpreting classics for decades (including his 1985 gospel reworking of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus). In 2007, she went to see his DollHouse in Edinburgh and again in Madrid, and then in 2009 she saw his "sublime" Peter and Wendy in Edinburgh. "Lee Breuer," she says, "is a truly great dramaturg" with a unique ability to interpret and stage plays. And she liked that his approaches were innovative, as she wanted to bring in artists who could "expand the Comédie-Française troupe's capabilities." Or, as Breuer puts it, "She wanted something a little crazy."
In Mayette and Breuer's first discussion, they decided to do Streetcar. The play was well known in France, due largely to the Elia Kazan film. Blanche DuBois was the iconic Williams victim—fragile, self-destructive and brutalized. And Stanley Kowalski, the brother-in-law who does her in, had become synonymous with a brand of charismatic, American working-class brute.
Breuer brought in puppeteer and director Basil Twist as his directing collaborator and designer. Twist had been the lead puppeteer in Breuer's Peter and Wendy (originally staged in 1996). And, after Breuer saw Twist's 1998 underwater staging of Symphonie Fantastique, a lyrical, abstract visualization of Berlioz's score, they had worked together on Red Beads (performed in 2005). It featured characters in billowing silks manipulated by the wind of hand-held fans.
For Streetcar, Breuer wanted to draw on another work by Twist, his Dogugaeshi (2007). Based on an extinct art form once performed by Japanese puppet theatres, it featured 88 pairs of screens, including abstract designs and deep-perspective trompe l'oeil.
What could the form of Dogugaeshi possibly have to do with Streetcar? For Breuer, it seemed to suit several of his goals for the show.
In order for a Tennessee Williams work to reverberate for a French sensibility, Breuer says, it had to incorporate "enough French memes for it to start to cook in French brains." A meme, Breuer explains, is like a strand of cultural DNA: "It can be a song, an idea, a concept, a philosophy, a sexuality—like Brando." The French have long had a propensity for formal elegance, abstraction and surrealism on stage. "Why was there this Robert Wilson phenomenon in France? Bob hit it because he was the transmogrification of [André] Breton—Breton born again in the 1970s," Breuer figures.
The French love of formal art goes back, of course, to neoclassicism, where the chaotic mess that is human passion got crafted, pulsing and trembling, into an elegant structure. And while the Comédie-Française repertory now includes many styles of theatre ("It is the opposite of a museum," Mayette says), something of that formal aesthetic does color its work. In its current Three Sisters, for example, the action continually resolves into stunning stage pictures—a foil to the disorder in the lives of Chekhov's characters. The Dogugaeshi influence that Breuer wanted for Streetcar, he says, would create a formalism and visual elegance. That dimension "would find its reality mainly through Basil's work."
Breuer's idea to use Dogugaeshi screens was tied also to his early notion of making the production a kind of homage to the Kazan film of Streetcar. Without aping the film's realism or its iconic characterizations—particularly Marlon Brando's Stanley and Vivien Leigh's Blanche—he wanted to give his staging a filmic quality that would subtly reference the movie. Giant, flat screens could be one way to do that.
The idea of an homage to Kazan eventually fell away, but some filmic elements remain in the staging. Using minimal furniture on movable platforms, Breuer frequently changes the angle of the audience's view, much as a camera would: "The bed is here and the bathroom is here in one scene and in the next scene it's reversed. It's like creating different filmic setups." Changing the audience's perspective helps to break out of realism and, at the same time, pulls spectators into the characters' world.
The Dogugaeshi screens, which always remain upright and parallel to the stage front, take on all sorts of conventions. For example, during Stanley's poker game, big, card-shaped flats zip across a frame whenever someone makes a play. And the screens increasingly become a window into a character's inner state or a way of commenting on a scene. When Blanche describes her young husband's suicide, we see first a woodcut of a handsome young samurai. At the gunshot, those screens open to reveal a startling painting (by the 19th-century Japanese artist Ekin) of a samurai, seen from a weird overhead angle, slicing off his own head.
To move some of the screens and the platforms on which action occurred, Twist employed the Comédie-Française's centuries-old sub-stage tracks, once used to bring in the painted wings and backdrops for Italian Renaissance scenery. Worked individually with manual cranks, they are almost never used today—not least because they make a racket. But Twist and Breuer loved the idea anyway. Twist says, "They make a kind of clackety-clack. We said, 'Great! Streetcar tracks!'"
Though Breuer and Twist are both Japanophiles, they did consider whether the American South/France/Japan cultural fusion in the piece might be too great a stretch. But while Japanese culture might initially seem far from the Deep South world of Streetcar, the two share not only an insistence on refinement and formality, but a vein of brutality not far underneath the surface. And the French, with their taste for formal beauty, have long had a penchant for Orientalism and Japonism. And France, of course, had a significant influence in shaping the American South, including Streetcar's New Orleans. So, Breuer says, "It's an interesting cultural triangle."
Twist and Breuer ease the audience into the Japanese vocabulary. The first screens are flat paintings of a streetcar bringing Blanche to her sister's house and have no particular Japanese flavor. Then, when Blanche is waiting for Stella and dying for a drink, screens illustrate her craving, showing larger and larger images of a bourbon bottle painted on gold-leaf—hints of Japonism. When Stella arrives, a Japanese-scroll image of a fawn appears. And the cultural fusion has been established.
The other Japanese convention Breuer and Twist used is kuroko, the black-clad "invisible" assistants who wait on kabuki actors. Besides giving the show a nonrealistic, theatrical formality, using kuroko allowed Breuer and Twist to keep the staging minimal, focusing the audience's attention exactly where they wanted it. For example, Bruer says, "When Blanche wants to smoke, they bring on a cigarette, lighter and ashtray; when she's done, they take them off."
In the rape scene, all these conventions have their payoff. A dozen screens of Japanese-woodcut images of waves—one including someone drowning—fly in and begin to sway around, echoing Blanche's frantic, drunken desperation. And finally, as Stanley becomes more and more menacing, the four kuroko don green fright wigs (like the one Stanley has been toying with throughout the play) and purple silk pajamas like Stanley's. With Stanley now in multiples, the scene becomes sheer terror.
Breuer felt that his Tramway nommé désir must "balance the French memes with American memes that have to do with emotional melodrama," allowing the "hot center" of the play to seethe. In fact, this duality meshes with an idea central to Breuer's work: "to fit Stanislavsky and Meyerhold together, to combine motivational and formalist performance." The audience, he says, must simultaneously feel and have an objective appreciation: "If you don't think, you can't feel, and if you don't feel, you have nothing to think about."
So while he was working toward a kind of formalism, he also was pressing the Comédie actors to experience the emotional turmoil in the play. "French acting," he says, "is the fastest in the world. American is the slowest, except for maybe Russian. Sometimes you need to get the French to just slow down—and feel." He needed to "cut through any pretense that they can use rhetorical acting." One way he did this was with microphones. Although "the French actors have voices that American actors would kill for," he says, he miked all the actors—something unusual in France and very rare at the Comédie-Française. The miking was mainly to create intimacy: "On stage, you can't zoom in on a face, but you can get an audio close-up" using a microphone.
At the center of all this, of course, are Williams's characters and their relationships. Breuer wanted to update the model for Stanley—partly as a way to circumvent the Brando icon. "I thought, we have to get out of the gorilla bag. Marlon dominated sexual metaphor in the Western world since that performance. And then things started to change, and Mick Jagger and then David Bowie started to poke into Marlon's Stanley icon." Breuer wanted to find a more contemporary, brazenly androgynous, Jaggeresque model of male charisma for Stanley. Fortunately Eric Ruf, the tall, ruggedly handsome Comédie star, could incorporate a more feminine dimension with plenty of male magnetism left to spare.
To bring the emotion/form dialectic into the acting, Breuer had Ruf play with tiger-like movement (Twist's suggestion). "But then Eric had all these snaky moves that I really liked," so the character moved in that direction. At some point, Breuer decided to tie Stanley to the Joker from The Dark Knight: tricky, amoral, charismatic.
Breuer asked his Blanche, Anne Kessler, to work with poses, almost as a Kabuki actor would, adding an additional layer to Blanche's posturing. Petite, slightly breathy, looking almost physically breakable next to Stanley, Kessler wound up simultaneously demonstrating and inhabiting Williams's character. Trapped in a world of goons, this was a Blanche trying to incarnate an impossible image.
Stella and Mitch, both played in a less stylized way, become full principals in this Streetcar's quadrangle of relationships. In Williams's play Stella is pulled between her sister, who embodies the debilitated way of life Stella fled, and her husband, whose vital but bestial energy is her life force. Françoise Gillard's Stella is not just caught in the middle, she is the middle, and she is pulled to pieces. The story is as much hers as Blanche's.
Mitch, Blanche's beau and lifeline, is hardly more than plot device in many productions. Here, played by Grégory Gadebois, the gullible, clumsy and sensitive Mitch also becomes a tragic casualty. Williams does indicate that Mitch eventually grasps what he has been party to. In Gadebois's awkward, trusting Mitch, you see not only the grief, the guilt and the anger but a loss of innocence that brings the audience to tears.
In Williams's ending of Streetcar, once the other characters are rid of Blanche, their world picks up where it left off, except perhaps for Mitch. (To satisfy Hollywood censors, Kazan's film had Stella leave Stanley, apparently for good.) The tragedy in Breuer's version is less cold, but more ironic and more complete. Stella at the end is depressed and broken, almost catatonic. Although she can't admit it, she knows what she's done. Just as Blanche's destruction of her own young husband years ago extinguished her joy forever, so Stella's betrayal of Blanche will extinguish hers. Stanley is left holding the baby, even changing its diaper. As Maude Mitchell, Breuer's dramaturg (and partner) puts it: "It will never be the same for them. The fireworks are gone. And after a while, Stanley will probably leave her." Mitch, after accusing Stanley of being the one who destroyed Blanche, races off on his motorbike—and seconds later we hear a deadly crash.
For the Comédie's actors, Breuer's way of working was totally new—especially the Stanislavsky/Meyerhold duality—but, with varying degrees of trepidation, they were mostly game. Shortly before the opening, Ruf told me, laughing, "When I come home, my wife"—also a Comédie-Française actor—"asks me how it's going. I tell her I have no idea. It's exciting, but—I have no idea!"
Mayette had been confident that the troupe would be open to this unfamiliar way of acting. "The great talent of this troupe is that it moves from one style to another all year long." And it is a true repertory company, with 15 plays in rotating rep just in the main Salle Richelieu, plus an equal number in each of the Comédie's other two houses. One day, Eric Ruf transforms from Stanley Kowalski in an afternoon rehearsal to the Greek general Pyrrhus in Racine's Andromaque at 8:30 that evening; the next day, he changes from Stanley to Chekhov's dangerously unbalanced Soliony. Even if the new rehearsal process did make some actors uncomfortable, no one could afford to be a diva—they all knew they would be working with one another tomorrow and next week and next year.
Breuer's directing is always a combination of analysis and a kind of irrepressible kid-with-a-chemistry-set glee. Watching him rehearse is like watching an idea faucet—they just keep coming out. Some are inspired. Some are off-the-wall. Some are inspired and off-the-wall. Some become takeoff points to totally different experiments. When Breuer packs together wildly disparate forms, his process seems less like the genetic engineering that, say, Julie Taymor does than like atomic fusion. He gets an idea—and BLAM! Let's see where this takes us.
In a way, Twist says, this forces him, though he is half Breuer's age, to be the "adult" in the collaboration, to keep things grounded at times. And, Twist jokes, he doesn't dare to leave rehearsal for half an hour. "When I come back it's like, 'What just happened here?'"
Inevitably, Breuer's "how about..." way of working leads to some oddball elements landing in the show. Why, for instance, is there a kuroko in a white gorilla suit hanging around the edges of Stanley's poker game? Beats me. On the other hand, a singer in the show's little Mardi Gras band manipulates a big, wooden alligator puppet head. It's perfect. It locates the action in the South. It foreshadows Blanche being swallowed alive by a beast.
And, to boot, it really brings home that the Old Crocodile is at the Comédie-Française.
Tennessee Williams wrote Vieux Carré at a point when his career and his life were increasingly shaky. (The show closed after four performances on Broadway.) But, curiously, it is an expression of personal realization and liberation.
A memory play, Vieux Carré evokes the down-and-out residents of a New Orleans rooming house where Williams lived briefly in 1939. These are people at the end of their rope: an old queen wasting from tuberculosis; a once-respectable Northern woman now dying and shacked up with a dope-dealing strip-joint bouncer; two elderly crones who are literally starving to death; and the half-crazy landlady and her pathetic, loony nurse, who hopes to retire and become a bag lady. Meanwhile, the Writer, Williams's alter-ego, broke and wracked with self-doubt, grapples with soul-killing loneliness and fears about his homosexuality. By the end, he has embraced his sexuality and has begun to sublimate the wretchedness around him into food for his writing.
Director Elizabeth LeCompte has given Vieux Carré the Wooster Group treatment. Her production combines high-tech, high-energy fragmentation with the precision integration of video and live action—something that has been part of the company's aesthetic since it brought Spalding Gray's dead mother back to life in Rumstick Road (1977) by projecting the image of her face onto the face of a live actress. As usual, the Wooster Group's acting is breathtaking. Here Kate Valk switches between the zany, manic-nutcase landlady Mrs. Wire and the wilted, once-elegant Jane Sparks. Scott Shepherd plays both the consumptive, sexually insatiable old Nightingale and Jane's drugged-out stud boyfriend, Tye McCool. And the troupe does bring out the heart of the play. In this case, by the end, we see other characters' dialogue in projected typescript as the Writer taps away at his keyboard. He has begun to transubstantiate misery into art.
As usual, too, the Wooster Group's insight comes with a price—a willingness to skew or discard inconvenient elements. They reduce the play's pair of starving ladies mainly to bizarre closeup video images of men in grotesque old-lady makeup. In the script, the two pathetic old women are an important part of the ballast of wretchedness, and trivializing them disserves the play.
Finally, though, the production incorporates a particularly American narcissistic meme. American Method acting, at its most self-indulgent, emphasizes the actor's inner experience, "living the role," over the experience of the audience. The Wooster Group sometimes seems to carry that principle into its directing. Its Vieux Carré staging is full of stuff that may have meaning for the company but is illegible or mysterious to the audience. Half a dozen video screens face the stage, visible only to certain spectators, and only if they happen to look up and back. Some of these screens show loops of porn, while others seem to show the actors rehearsing naked. But it matters little what they show, because it is for them, not us. What an interesting contrast to Breuer's approach in Tramway nommé désir: While he tries to shape Williams's Streetcar to engage a wider audience, the Wooster Group invites us to look on as it makes Vieux Carré its own.
Eileen Blumenthal is a professor of theatre arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, and is a frequent contributor to this magazine.
Cease and Desist? Shutting Williams Down
"Tennessee Williams always said he was a poet," Lee Breuer says, "and so we're letting him be a poet." Whoa, not so fast, Lee. "Cease and desist" orders have been issued for both the Comédie-Française Un tramway nommé désir and the Wooster Group's Vieux Carré, as well as for a version of Streetcar starring Isabelle Huppert that played last year at Paris's Théâtre de l'Odéon—and who knows how many other productions? The anonymous decision-makers (who would speak with me only through their attorney) are associated with Sewanee: the University of the South. In controlling Williams's literary estate, they work with London agent Tom Erhardt, described as Williams's literary executor (who would not speak with me at all). The Wooster Group says it has now managed to negotiate an agreement, which includes calling future performances The Wooster Group's Version of Tennessee Williams's Vieux Carré. The producers of the Odéon performance are embroiled in legal action with the Williams estate. And the Comédie-Française has not yet released its plans, though it seems inconceivable that the Breuer/Twist Tramway would not have a long future life. Good thing these folks didn't represent Sophocles or Racine, or we might not have had Gospel at Colonus or the Wooster Group's To You, the Birdie (Phèdre). In any case, stay tuned. —Blumenthal
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