Review: Vieux Carre (Raven Theatre)

  
  
Vieux Carre

Written by Tennessee Williams 
Directed by Cody Estle 
at Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark (map)
thru June 28  |  tickets: $36   |  more info
  
Check for half-price tickets 
  
  
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A sardonic celebration of desperation

Raven Theatre presents

Vieux Carre

Review by Lawrence Bommer

Concluding Raven Theatre’s “Longing for Another Life” season, Vieux Carre drives home the theme with a vengeance for the naïve and a nameless author’s surrogate, naïve in everything but his aspirations. It’s been 37 years since Tennessee Williams wrote this darkly doomed memory play set in the French Quarter, his emotional heartland and one-time residence at 722 Toulouse Street. Fondly and ferociously depicted, this moldy New Orleans boarding house is overrun with bedbugs, cockroaches, bats–and the future author of The Glass Menagerie. Here the artist is a 25-year-old apprentice writer who retroactively recalls his craft as he brings the boarders back to life.

Trying to negotiate “a truce with life,” Williams’ young gay surrogate (a mannered but vulnerable Ty Olwin) succumbs to what he prissily calls the “perversion of longing.” (His one consummated affair is a quickie with a paratrooper.) But writing burns him more than sex: Though he’s temporarily pawned his typewriter, everything The Writer sees is grist for plays and poems to come—the once and future Blanche, Maggie, Big Mama, Alma, Stanley, Brick. Curiously, he’s depicted as suffering from a cataract in one eye, the same artist’s affliction that Williams later repeated in Something Cloudy, Something Clear, his more sexually forthright depiction of life and art in the Florida Keys.

Sincerely staged by Cody Estle, Vieux Carre is a sardonic celebration of desperation. Ray Toler has designed a cluttered rooming house as fragmented as the action, battered, lived-in and recalling grainy snapshots from a discarded family album. But, of course, the characters, not the setting or situations, are the plot, starting with the alternately maternal and malicious landlady (Joanne Montemurro, a witch with a hidden heart). Abhorring the modern “Babylon” she calls the French Quarter, the tightly strung Mrs. Wire can ladle out her famous gumbo, skimp on light bulbs, or pour boiling water on a recalcitrant tenant and badly bosses her Jamaican maid Nursie (Sandra Watson).

  

Mired in various stages of loneliness, the tenants include two seemingly starving spinsters (Kristin Collins and Debra Rodkin), dumpster divers one step away from homelessness; a hunky junkie and Bourbon Street stripshow barker Tye (Joel Reitsma) who anticipates Mr. Kowalski; dying Jane (much moving Eliza Stoughton), a Blanche spin-off who’s seen better years and is sinking into hallucinations; and a white jazzman (Christopher Borek), a savior with a saxophone who helps the Writer to escape this hard hostelry.

Giving a sardonic meaning to the “kindness of strangers,” the most tragic figure is queer and aging Nightingale (Will Casey), a once hopeful painter now reduced to sketching tourists in the Quarter. About to be evicted shortly before he dies of consumption, “M. Rossignol” warns the Writer not to harden his heart. If Williams ever penned a Camille, this is she.

Like all Williams’ later works this memory-mongering 1977 venture (which closed after five performances) is overlong, claustrophobically self-conscious, and too infatuated with failure. But it’s worthy of Williams in its seedy decadence, compassion for ten of life’s underdogs, and spurts of glorious self-pity. Williams put himself in all these characters and Estle makes them burst from the script. It’s never wrong to spend 150 minutes in Williams’ complex company.

Rating: ★★★½

Vieux Carre continues through June 28th at Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark (map), with performances Thursdays-Saturdays at 7:30pm, Sundays 3pm.  Tickets are $36, and are available by phone (773-338-2177) or online through OvationTix.com (check for half-price tickets at Goldstar.com). More information at RavenTheatre.com.  (Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes, includes an intermission)

Photos by Dean La Prairie

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artists

cast

Ty Olwin (The Writer), JoAnn Montemurro (Mrs. Wire), Will Casey (Nightingale), Joel Reitsma (Tye), Eliza Stoughton (Jane), Sandra Watson (Nursie), Debra Rodkin, Kristin Collins (Mary Maude), Christopher Borek (Sky), Lane Flores, Miles Barrett

behind the scenes

Cody Estle (director), Ray Toler (set design), Kate Masiak (stage manager), Mary O’Dowd (props design), Greg Hofmann, Garvin Jellison (lighing design), Stefin J. Steberl (costume design), Christopher Kriz (sound design), David Woolley (fight choreography), Andrei Onegin (tech director), Jack Bourgeois (asst. director), Shane Murray-Corcoran (asst. stage manager), Lukas Brasherfons (dramaturg), Dean La Prairie (photos)

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