The Eccentricities of a Nightingale
The Eccentricities of a Nightingale
Back Stage
David A. Rosenberg
May 6,2008
Tennessee Williams was never satisfied. Obsessed with demons in his private and public lives, he revised many of his plays, none more drastically, perhaps, than his 1947 Summer and Smoke. Resurfacing on Broadway in 1976 as The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, it hasn't been seen hereabouts since. Now it's back, and what was once a schematic work about Alma (the soul) versus John (the body) has become a peculiar, less subtle, less moving love story between two repressed individuals. For Alma is now not the only virgin in Glorious Hill, Miss. John, who in Summer and Smoke led a dissolute life until snared by Nellie, has become not only a mama's boy but a na?f who actually ran away from a pickup who took him to "one of those rooms that people engage for an hour." In this version, it's Alma who suggests the tryst. The predatory reversal, when it comes, is much the best reason to praise what starts as a weak remake before finding its footing.
Much of the writing is either extraneous or overdone. Williams piles on the symbols -- fire equals passion, plume equals virtue -- can't resist a shaggy tale about a boa constrictor, and creates in John's mother a gorgon to rival Gypsy's Madame Rose. Eliminating the colorful characters of John's father, the sexy Rosa and her drunken dad, not to mention a shooting, Williams boils his tale down to the Alma-John love story, although he keeps such scenes as the July 4 fireworks and the ascetic literary meeting. And, of course, his idiosyncratic writing can still dazzle, as it does when the focus is on Alma and John.
That it eventually works as well as it does is due in large part to Jenn Thompson's sensitive direction and to the performances of Todd Gearhart as John and Mary Bacon as Alma. Indeed, Gearhart brings such verisimilitude to a role that could be a parody that he forces Bacon to tone down her initial histrionics and match him in complexity. Also impressive are Cynthia Darlow as the acerbic Mrs. Bassett and Larry Keith as Alma's long-suffering father, the Rev. Winemiller, a character modeled after Williams' own grandfather and the voice not only of reason but of warning. "Eccentrics are not happy, they are not happy people," he says. He's talking about Alma but may as well be referring to Williams himself, who proves once again that he is, as biographer Nancy M. Tischler has written, "an amoral moralist" and a "rebellious puritan."