By Cynthia Citron
LOS ANGELES — If Tennessee Williams were still alive, he’d be 100 years old this year. And so, in recognition of the occasion, theaters all over town are mounting new productions of his plays. Including the always-wonderful Fountain Theatre, which is currently presenting Williams’ final play, A House Not Meant to Stand.
Considering the fact that the last time the Fountain produced a Williams play, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Any More, which was a total mess on every count, this new production represents a pretty big leap of faith. But fortunately, under the inspiring direction of Simon Levy and brilliant performances by a stellar cast, House stands up surprisingly well.
Subtitled A Gothic Comedy, House introduces the McCorkles, a couple just returning to their home in Pascagoula, Mississippi, from the funeral of their eldest son, Chip. The house they are returning to is, indeed, not meant to stand. The roof is leaking all over the living room, large splotches of bare interior walls peek out from tattered wallpaper, and the lighting, gloomy at the best of times, keeps suffering from intermittent power failure. In short, Set Designer Jeff McLaughlin has successfully produced one of the tackiest settings to be seen east or west of the Mississippi, and Ken Booth’s lighting design matches it in tackiness.
The McCorkles, too, are relentlessly tacky. The patriarch, Cornelius, is a blustering bully, loud, offensive, and arrogant, and Alan Blumenfeld plays him exquisitely. As so often in his work, Williams’ characters reflect his own family in all its miserable dysfunction, and this Cornelius mirrors his own father, whose name was also Cornelius.
The mother in this family, however, is no Amanda Wingfield. Bella McCorkle (Sandy Martin) is a hollow-eyed, delusional, beaten-down creature teetering on the brink of dementia. She takes pride in the fact that her family, the Dancies, were originally more genteel than the McCorkles and that they are rumored to have had a bit of money at one time.
That money, which supposedly came to Bella, provides a strong incentive for Cornelius’ abuse. He persistently tries to wheedle information out of his wife, but she is adamant in her denial of any inheritance.
Caught in the middle of the storm, literally and figuratively, is the younger son, Charlie, played with frantic panache by Daniel Billet. Between supporting his mother and taking care of his born-again girlfriend (a lively Virginia Newcomb), he has his work cut out for him. And it doesn’t help that his mother keeps calling him Chip.
In an additional subplot, a neighborhood couple, Jessie and Emerson Sykes (Lisa Richards and Robert Craighead) drop by to offer condolences to the McCorkles on the death of their son. Emerson is also eager to share news of his latest project: a string of florid hostels he calls the Night of Glory Motels.
The Fountain’s production is the first time this play has been performed in the West. Originally a one-act play called Some Problems for the Moose Lodge, it premiered in Chicago in 1980. A few months later, expanded into a full-length play, it opened again in Chicago’s Goodman Studio Theatre.
While Williams continued to develop it over an 18-month period, he kept renaming it. Some of the proposed titles included The Dancie Money, Our Lady of Pascagoula, The Legendary Bequest of a Moonshine Dancer, Laundry Hung on the Moon, and A House Not Meant to Last Longer than the Owner. The final version, A House Not Meant to Stand, opened in 1982, nine months before Williams died.
Williams’ ambivalence about the title is reflected in the play itself. The characters, depressingly scuzzy, are somehow surprisingly sympathetic as well. Nevertheless, A House Not Meant to Stand is an unhappy play, despite the fact that it is billed as a Gothic comedy. As Williams said about it, “The house, and therefore the title, is a metaphor for society in our times.” Further, he described Southern Gothic, an exposition of the grotesque, as presented by such Southern authors as William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O’Connor, and Truman Capote, among others, as “a style that captures an intuition of an underlying dreadfulness in modern experience.”
Dreadful or not, A House Not Meant to Stand is worth a visit. Mainly because it’s being presented at the Fountain, which is a house that, we believe, is meant to stand for a very long time.
A House Not Meant to Stand will continue Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 through April 17th. The Fountain Theatre is located at 5060 Fountain Avenue, in Los Angeles. Call (323) 663-1525 for reservations.
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Citron is Los Angeles bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World. She may be reached at cynthia.citron@sdjewishworld.com