The Eccentricities of a Nightingale
The Eccentricities of a Nightingale
Show Business Weekly
Andrea M. Meek
May 12, 2008
Like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire and Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, the high-strung Alma Winemiller in The Eccentricities of a Nightingale reflects Tennessee Williams?s penchant for fragile, emotionally unstable female characters. In the play, which Williams wrote in 1951 as a revision of his earlier work, Summer and Smoke, Alma (the excellent Mary Bacon) is a misunderstood and ostracized oddity in the small town of Glorious Hill, Mississippi, just before World War I. Her father, the Rev. Winemiller (Larry Keith), tries to suppress her eccentricities, warning that her behavior attracts ridicule, while her mother (Nora Chester) has already succumbed to mental illness. Known as ?the nightingale of the Delta? for her affectation and melodramatic tendencies as much as for her singing, the sensitive young Alma always seems just a hair away from a breakdown.
She channels her loneliness into an obsessive love for the boy next-door, the handsome Dr. John Buchanan, Jr. (Todd Gearhart), who has just returned to Glorious Hill after graduating from John Hopkins University. The doctor is sympathetic to her neediness and strives to understand her with a compassion the locals do not have. Hoping to thwart any passion between the two is his high-society mother, Mrs. Buchanan (Darrie Lawrence), Southern matriarch extraordinaire, who takes the term ?mama?s boy? to a whole new level.
Last seen on Broadway in 1974, The Eccentricities of a Nightingale is given an exceptional treatment by The Actors Company Theatre. Subtle direction by Jenn Thompson heightens the tension of the story. The simplistic but elegant set design by Bill Clarke serves to focus attention on the characters and action of the play, and David Toser is to be praised for his beautiful costume design. The cast is superb. Bacon manages to maintain the perfect balance between Alma?s sensitivity and histrionics, giving her loneliness a palpability that is painful to witness. Gearhart, Keith, Chester and Lawrence all give standout performances, and Cynthia Darlow, as Mrs. Basset, one of Alma?s few oddball friends, also deserves a special mention for her comic performance. This little gem of a production serves as a first-rate revival of one of Williams?s lesser-known plays.