Theatre/Theater L.A.: Orpheus Descending

Hopefully Sue will get around to posting her experiences but I thought I'd post my review of the Sunday matinee performance which was, appropriately enough, on Valentine's Day. The house was full, they had to scrounge around for extra chairs, and I was pleased to see that there weren’t many defectors by the end of the show. Having left shows myself at intermission, I’m always curious to see how many people make it to the end of a long play. That said, it really didn’t feel like three plus hours (including the two intermissions). If anything, it felt too short. I wanted the actors to slow down in some of the scenes and give themselves and the text an opportunity to breathe. Also, I’ve always had a problem with the third act of the play; it feels unfinished and too short considering what’s gone before.

I have to state up front that Tennessee Williams has never been one of my favorite playwrights. My background is drama, I have an MFA in playwriting so I’ve read a lot of plays and seen a lot of plays. I’m also from the South which means, I have a love/hate relationship with Southern writers. My problem with Williams has always been his tendency towards melodrama and hysteria. His female characters, in particular, can come across as shrill and hysterical all out of proportion to the situation. Add in the poetic realism and the myth, in this case, and you’ve got a recipe for potential theatrical disaster. One of the pitfalls of performing Tennessee Williams plays is that actors try to “act Southern” or try to imbue the play with additional poetry instead of trusting the text. It’s the same way with farce: you can’t layer onto the text a ham-fisted performance style. You have to trust the text, play it straight, and the farce or, in this case, the poetry, arises from the situation. It takes a special kind of actor not to succumb to the impulse to overact. Mr. Harold is definitely that special kind of actor.

His performance was subtle and his accent was spot on. I could hear undertones of Elvis in his speech, more Mississippi Delta than Louisiana bayou but it was consistent. His Val was like a wild animal, always warily watching the others, seemingly posed to flee at any moment. Watching him move around the stage was like watching an athlete on the field, very graceful, very aware of his physical presence. He was a wise fool, a wild child, and he charmed without even trying. Even his slewfoot swaggering seemed natural and laid back. It was difficult to take your eyes off of him. I found myself watching his reactions to others on stage. Not that he was upstaging anyone, just that his concentration and commitment to the character was so complete that you could gauge the scene by his reactions. He’s a great listener as an actor. I never got the feeling that he was just waiting to say his lines. You saw him listen to the others, then respond. You could see Val struggling to understand, see him struggling to communicate, having to find the words to explain himself when in the past he may have used physical means. He even says in the play that he used to think you could got to know people by touch and now he’s having to get to know them by other means and you could see him struggling with that. He was, indeed, a peculiar talker because he wasn’t used to talking to people. But even as he struggled with the words, his body seemed to find the right words. Seeing him hold Vee’s hands or stroke Lady’s neck was to watch him communicating. And, yet, those moments of communication were sometimes interpreted incorrectly. I think all those years of playing Brian Kinney paid off in that, like Brian, Val wasn’t always good with words, was sometimes better with showing than telling and so, Gale knows how to communicate without words, with just the merest of gestures.

Some of the most beautiful moments in the play were the moments when he was singing. Others have said it, but it bears repeating, he has a beautiful voice. It was very surprising just how lovely it was. Soft, sweet, and a little bit smoky. I too was reminded of Chet Baker and afterwards I kept hearing this song in my head and it turned out to be a song Sting sings on his Christmas album, “Lullaby to an Anxious Child”. Gale could have totally done that song as his guitar playing was quite good too. The man is just full of surprises.

Other favorite moments were moments when someone cornered him. When Carol confronts him in the first act and he lashes out at her right before singing “Heavenly Grass” for the first time; or when she confronts him in act two and he throws down the watch; when Lady tries to keep him in town by holding onto his guitar; when the Sheriff and the men of the town corner him in the store. You could see the fear in his eyes, the fight or flight instinct kicking in. Despite the fact that Gale was taller than the other men on stage, you felt the character’s fear of being physically harmed. He was definitely a lover, not a fighter.

As far as the production went, was it entirely successful? No, but the problems of the production are largely problems of the text. Williams tried to hang a lot on the myth of Orpheus and wasn’t entirely successful. Some ideas come through clearer than others. I don’t know that I entirely buy the love story in the play and that has nothing to do with any lack of chemistry between Gale and Denise. I don’t think the text fully develops the love story. I’ve seen another version of the Orpheus myth on stage, "Eurydice" by Sarah Ruhl, and I didn’t buy the love story in that one for one moment. At all. I think playwrights sometimes use myths as a way of letting themselves off the hook when it comes to character development and plot development. Once you plant the idea of Orpheus and Eurydice in the audience’s mind, is that enough? I don’t think so. I do think "Orpheus Descending" does a better job of exploring the relationship but really only the beginnings of the relationship. I believed they were fond of each other and I believed that they were intrigued by one another. I didn’t completely buy Val’s declaration of love for Lady in the last scene. I wanted to because I think Gale wanted you to believe that Val loved Lady but the play itself didn’t do a good enough job of convincing me of that love. As for Lady, I never thought she truly loved Val not the way she loved David Cutrere. But, I didn’t really have to believe her love for him as I don’t think that was the point of the play. Both Carol and Lady wanted something from Val that he couldn’t give them. They heard something in his song that they wanted to hear whether or not it was truly there. They were both aspects of Eurydice, as was Vee. And so Val responded to each of them in certain ways. None of the women could have fulfilled him individually. I think that’s why I didn’t buy the declaration of love. Then again, maybe that was the point the play was making, that Val really wanted to love her but he didn’t realize that he couldn’t because she was not enough. He speaks earlier in the play about love being the make-believe answer to a question he’d been asking all his life. Unfortunately, in Lady, he had found another make-believe answer but this time thought he’d found the real answer.

Anyway, enough of my rambling about the play. You can tell a playwright, we can talk about the text forever. *lol* I do have to add that now that I've seen him in "Orpheus Descending" and he's done "Suddenly Last Summer," I'd love to see what he could do with one of Williams' better-known and better-received plays, like "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" or "Streetcar." Of course, he wouldn't want to get typecast but I would love to see what he could do with Brick or Stanley. As much as I liked Paul Newman and Brando in those roles, I think there's a vulnerability that Gale allows to show in his performances that lends itself to portraying men trapped by circumstance.


Some of the other actors kinda rushed through scenes, rushed through lines, but he actually let the text breathe, let the character of Val breathe on stage. I loved the way he'd take a beat or two, the way a real person would, before responding sometimes. It was moments like that that let you see who Val was, see his struggle; more so that what he said, it was how he said it.