Friends & Lovers, Parrots & Waltzes

An Essay by Julie Bleha

Phoenix Theatre Ensemble's inaugural season continues with Plays in a Pub, a program of two one-acts opening April 4th. The two plays, A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot by Tennessee Williams and Can Can by Romulus Linney, are significantly different but also speak to each other in interesting and revealing ways. What unites them, more than anything else, reflects PTE’s mission: the plays address a cultural fundamental – the stories we tell and are told – in order to get through our day or to give meaning to our life as a whole. In both their genesis and execution, they ask, what are the stories that take hold of us, that live with us, that demand we share them with others? In the case of A Perfect Analysis…, Williams revisits characters he’d created for another world in an earlier play; in Can Can, Linney revisits a person and experience from his past, and uses these recollections as the basis for a dramatic diptych of love stories. Both plays look at the ties that bind us to each other – friendship and love – while also exploring the underside of those glorious feelings – separation or even rejection.

An obvious similarity between the two playwrights and their voices is that both have been, throughout their careers, hailed as “Southern writers.” Williams famously explored the pathologies of the Southern family, while Linney’s reputation is staked, in part, on his retelling of stories and reshaping of characters from his Appalachian roots. Almost mandatory in any discussion on Southern writing is a reference to the intensely rhythmic nature of the language; just because such references come fast and furious, though, doesn’t mean they’re clichés. In fact, both Williams and Linney’s works are exemplars of the wedding of lyric quality with everyday speech. Also paramount in the work of these two men is a sense of the power and pull of time and memory; they show us characters who inhabit simultaneous connections to past and present. In turn, we think of our own past and wonder, what questions would we have answered, if we could: will a passionate love last? will a friendship survive a frost? later in life, when we recall pivotal events, will they be re-scripted to accommodate nostalgic yearnings?

This question of reshaping is key to understanding Williams’ seemingly light-hearted treatment of friendship that we see in A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot. The play re-casts two characters from his 1949 play The Rose Tattoo. In this work set in an immigrant Sicilian community on the Gulf of Mexico, Williams introduces Anglo-Americans Flora and Bessie, whom he refers to as clowns in the stage directions. As characters, they are indeed grotesques of a sort, and they serve as contrast in personality and sentiment to the play’s (by then) distressed and despairing protagonist, Serafina. She is all emotion and voluptuousness, even if she does her best to repress it at times throughout the play; however, we’re meant to understand that her lust is, ultimately, not shameful. Flora and Bessie, on the other hand, are crass sexuality and loveless promiscuity personified, overlaid with Anglo-Saxon moral superiority, and even a touch of gratuitous cruelty. In The Rose Tattoo, Flora and Bessie do not come off as comely characters, physically or otherwise. However.

Flora and Bessie stayed with Williams, and over the course of the years, it must have occurred to him more than once that there was another side to them, that perhaps these “two girls in the late afternoon of their youth, which is close to forty” (as Parrot’s stage directions introduce them) deserved another visit. Perhaps, like A Streetcar Named Desire’s Blanche DuBois, Flora and Bessie are fighting an unfair fight in this world, and they deserve another hearing. Williams takes the two women, makes them Memphis natives, and brings them to “the interior of a St. Louis tavern,” which is where we meet them shortly after the curtain rises on Parrot.

The fun begins immediately; whereas Serafina’s costume suggested sackcloth, and Blanche’s clutch and compact suggested the accoutrements of a fading belle, Flora and Bessie have “cartwheel hats” that are so huge that “when and if they want to look at each other, it is necessary to tilt their heads far back.” The harshly named “clowns” of the earlier play are now shown with loving (even slightly indulgent) humor. To each other – at the play’s start, anyway – Flora and Bessie are in perfect form, fashion-wise and friendship-wise.

It is the work of the play to explore, in a tight little framework, the nature of that friendship. The two have a long history with each other; the play’s title weaves a strand into the girls’ search for meaning into that history. As Flora and Bessie go through their fond memories of chasing the good times and the fun-loving boys at the annual Sons of Mars conventions, they test what they mean to each other, how they see themselves in relation to each other, and what the strength of their friendship is. The “perfect analysis” of the title refers to something Flora has learned from the eponymous parrot (incidentally, another character holdover from The Rose Tattoo) which she uses to parse the nature of her personality and relationship with Bessie.

The play’s director, Jonathan Silverstein, knew the play and when he heard that PTE was producing it, his eagerness to work with the company and desire to do the play made him a perfect choice for helming the production. Says Silverstein, “ the play speaks to me about how friends treat one another,” adding that Flora and Bessie’s practice of “savagely critiquing the other in the basest ways ([regarding] weight and skin problems)” while waiting for some Sons of Mars to show up and “entertain and distract” them, is a potentially horrifying act. But, the director notes, because “all is forgotten when the men arrive,” this made him “wonder why these women are friends in the first place.” Silverstein names rehearsal as the process by which he hopes to discover the answer to that question, adding “in the quest for this, I think we will find the true humanity behind these women’s harsher sides.”

Clearly, one of the challenges for the director lies in finding the balance between the play’s savagery and tenderness, a tension frequently excavated by Williams. Williams’s sympathy for the slightly- or ill-used of our society, so clear in his rendition of Blanche, lives on through the humor of A Perfect Analysis... Indeed, Bessie says she does “her part to create some happiness in the world, even if it’s just for one night,” adding that “it isn’t a crime to give a good time and a pleasant memory, even to a stranger”; this could be playwright, director and actor each staking a light-hearted claim for their work as artists.

Williams produced a great number of short plays, and this play, like the others, presents a challenge to the artists involved with it. Unlike longer plays, which have the time and space in which to explore details of a number of issues, short plays are, as Silverstein puts it, “much more dense”; they demand that the artists “get to the heart of the matter” much faster. However, the director feels that because short “plays let us focus [on] smaller parts of a drama” they “often can let us go deeper,” because “they generally only deal with one issue or incident and enlarge on that.”

Romulus Linney also welcomes the compactness that comes with this form of dramatic story-telling. He approvingly cites Edward Albee’s statement that “there’s no such thing as a one-act,” suggesting that a full story can be rendered with brevity. In fact, there are some “things you can express in a short play that get thin in a long play,” says Linney.

In a wonderful act of dramatic compression, Linney gives us in Can Can two separate love stories that travel across time and geography, memory and emotion. We meet a young American GI (the proverbial innocent abroad?) and a young French woman; in the States, a young “country club fool,” housewife-to-be happens to meet an older “homely and countrified” woman. None of the characters are named (though Linney, the ex-GI, dedicates the play to Mireille Bertrand, the closest we will come to specific identities); but the particularity of their situations is clear enough as we hear them all re-tell their stories, filtered by time and distance.

In Can Can, PTE member Elise Stone notes, the stories share with us a “joy of having known a kind of ‘love’.” In fact, it was this powerful rendering of mood that drew the company to the piece. One of the main questions reflected in the juxtaposition of the two love stories is, as Linney rewords it, “in your life, how many times do you meet someone who’s that important to you amorously?” The Young Woman tells the G.I. “you are my first man… I picked you for that,” adding “as long as I live, I will never forget you.” What does he feel when he hears such a powerful statement? How will he remember that feeling in years to come? The two couples, moving through courtship, entrancement, wonder, love and finally parting, relate the lasting effect such encounters have on them, and by extension, us.

Linney reports that Can Can was commissioned as one of six short plays based on a piece of pop or classical music for a program called “Pops,” and so he began with Offenbach’s famous “Can-Can.” Using music as the starting point for a play is more than just an exercise: in Linney’s case, music is a natural artistic parallel to writing. The lyricism of Linney’s dialogue is highlighted by the play’s musical framework. The compositions that begin and end the play (the latter being Offenbach’s waltz “Orpheus in the Underworld”) are evocative in their own way. Though there are undertones of longing and regret in what passes between the characters, the fact that the play ends with what Linney terms a “lovely little waltz” is a nod to the ultimate hope and joy that are by-products of any encounter with love. Love – even its residue – can be uplifting, even if it the person with whom we shared the encounter no longer remains in our life. With this idea at the root of Plays in a Pub, Phoenix Theatre Ensemble’s foray into the world of these two works promise a lovely little evening of theatre.