To kick off the Hartford Stage's 40th anniversary season, artistic director Michael Wilson, who five years ago embarked on the project of presenting the entire Tennessee Williams canon, has chosen to stage eight relatively unfamiliar one-act plays divided into two quartets ("Rose" and "Blue"), presented in repertory. The plays cover a span from the late 1930s until a few weeks before the dramatist's death in 1983.
The two programs are nicely framed by a huge storeroom suggesting the International Shoe Company in St. Louis, where Williams worked as a youth and began writing in leisure hours. Most notably, three of the pieces here are world premieres, all included in the Rose program. The earliest, The Palooka (ca. 1937-39; 11 min.), recalls David Mamet's much later A Life in the Theater. But whereas Mamets's one-act joins an aging actor and an aspiring beginner, Williams brings together a has-been boxer and a neophyte pugilist.
The wonderfully titled, Now the Cats With Jewelled Claws (1969, revised 1981; 32 min.) finds two ladies meeting for lunch and chatting cattily under the eye of a prissy restaurateur. Suddenly, the trio burst into a musical interlude and dance, only to be interrupted by the arrival of a pair of leather-clad gay hustlers. Eventually they all join in a Kurt Weillesque musical number, cut off by an apocalyptic explosion. Hilarious satire is not often associated with Williams, and this play is a real discovery.
The other premiere is The One Exception (1983; 21 min.), Williams' last play, in which an artist (heartbreakingly acted by Amanda Plummer) has a near-catatonic breakdown that might lead to institutionalization or suicide.
The "Rose" program also contains Portrait of a Madonna (1946; 25 min.), where a genteel Southerner becomes delusional and is taken away by a doctor and nurse -- clearly a rehearsal for the last scene of A Streetcar Named Desire, written the next year. The "Blue" program begins with The Lady of Larkspur Lotion (1942; 14 min.), in which two tipsy tenants of a New Orleans rooming house are hounded for the rent by the landlady. Something Unspoken (1953; 24 min.) features a Southern spinster and her secretary who await word about whether their employer has been elected president of the Confederate Daughters. The Chalky White Substance (1980; 12 min.), placed a century after a thermonuclear war, suggests that love may still exist in a bleak snowy landscape as an older man caresses the chest of a younger man. The Gnadiges Fraulein (1966; 48 min.), a zany absurdist farce, finds a bunch of boarding-house eccentrics - - including an ex-singer and a huge cocaloony bird -- competing for the same fish with unfortunate results.
Director Wilson has mounted these plays expertly and elicited particularly outstanding performances from the aforementioned Plummer, Annalee Jefferies, Jennifer Harmon, and Elizabeth Ashley.
