Off-Broadway Play Review—Tennessee Williams’ “Orpheus Descending”

Orpheus Descending

Written by Tennessee Williams; directed by Erica Schmidt

Performances through August 6, 2023

Theatre for a New Audience, 262 Ashland Avenue, Brooklyn, NY

tfana.org

Pico Alexander and Maggie Siff in Orpheus Descending (photo: Hollis King)

On Broadway in 1989, director Peter Hall bemusedly helmed Tennessee Williams’ messy 1957 play Orpheus Descending, a crude melodrama crammed with specious symbolism and idle imagery. Despite Williams’ endless tinkering with it, Orpheus never reaches the poetic heights of The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; instead, its overwrought dialogue and contrived relationships make it seem like a bizarre parody of a Williams play.

Now, Orpheus Descending returns, directed by Erica Schmidt, who wholeheartedly embraces its excessiveness, for better or (often) worse. Young drifter Valentine Xavier (i.e., “Savior”) arrives in a small Southern town that could be the setting for a bad Jason Aldean song. Guitar in hand, Valentine descends into this hell to, it turns out, rescue Lady Torrance, the unhappily married proprietor of the local dry-goods store, whose mortally ill elderly husband—an unrepentant redneck—spends most of his time upstairs, attended to by a nurse. 

Handsome and charming, Valentine finds himself the target of other local women, including rich good-time girl Carol Cutrere, who loves to go “juking” at night, as well as other chattering gossipers who frequent the store. As they spend time together working in the store, Valentine and Lady start a steamy but dangerous affair that will end with two dead bodies and the community’s stalwart backwardness reinforced.

Schmidt dives headfirst into these characters’ desperation and inability to pull themselves free of their unfortunate fates, which is the only way to stage Orpheus and make it watchable—if not particularly illuminating. It’s unfortunate that Amy Rubin’s constricted set of the Torrances’ store leaves so much stage acreage available, and Schmidt utilizes it awkwardly, with some scenes played in front or at the sides of the store, including florid monologues and periodic appearances of the heavily—and fuzzily—symbolic “conjure-man.” The sound and lighting effects are adroitly handled by, respectively, Justin Ellington and David Weiner, and Ellington’s own acoustic guitar music is used sparingly but effectively.

Many speeches, where Williams lets his metaphors fly—like the footless bird that must always remain airborne a particular favorite to which he keeps returning—come off as sketches for the more luminous language the playwright would perfect in his masterpieces. Schmidt’s cast is sometimes able to untangle itself from such extravagances to find a bit of sorely needed humanity, although there are too many characters milling around that have little to do with the story, merely providing more samples of the overheated atmosphere.

Pico Alexander, as Valentine, is attractively animalistic and makes a more magnetic (and musical) martyr than Kevin Anderson did opposite Redgrave. A born scene-stealer, Julia McDermott makes Carol sadly but compellingly pathetic, spitting out her awful torrents of Williams’ pregnant metaphorical dialogue to flail around amid the misogynistic environment she’s been brought up in with commanding flair.

In the 1989 Broadway staging, Vanessa Redgrave played Lady Torrance: she was a spectacular car crash, giving a thrilling exercise in technique that never felt true or authentic. Conversely, Maggie Siff—who’s magnificent as Wendy Rhoades in the Showtime series Billions—mostly underplays Lady, cutting straight to the heart of this grievously wounded but proud woman. Siff even gives a piercingly emotional reading of Lady’s final overripe speech about remembering a barren fig tree while a child. 

But Siff plays Lady with an accent that’s less Southern Italian than Eastern European, which is headscratching. (Weirdly, Redgrave had also played Lady with an offbeat accent—sing-song Italian, which at least was theoretically closer to the target.) But why not just play Lady with a regional southern accent? After all, she’s lived her entire life in the South, not Sicily.