Two excellent Chicago actors, Carmen Roman and Steve Key, have returned to American Theater Company for a pungent revival of “Orpheus Descending,” the 1957 Tennessee Williams potboiler in which a guitar-slinging drifter in a snakeskin jacket lights the fuse of a Sicilian-American shopkeeper. A rewrite of Williams’ early work “Battle of Angels,” the play seethes with so much lust, humidity, venality and lust — did I mention lust? — it’s more of a cauldron-boiler. It invites the sort of feverish interpretation in which actors shift into hysteria mode and can’t get out again and eventually drown in all that overspiced gumbo.
Well, not this production. Here, wiry, clear-eyed, raven-haired Roman plays Lady Torrence. Key, resembling a more compact and quick-witted Tim Robbins, plays Val Xavier, the hunky Orpheus figure, straight out of the bayou. These are subtle performers who can swing for the fences but know when to say when. They have the stuff for Williams’ operatic, mythically scaled passion. But in director Damon Kiely’s staging — his best to date at ATC — they find the human beings inside all the humid theatrics.
Williams didn’t want “Orpheus Descending” to be realistic. He wrote a play set in a general store in tiny, vicious little Two Rivers County, Miss., with a Greek chorus of clucking hypocrites, as well as a conjure man whose cries herald the stranger with the guitar.
Val, a hustler of all sorts of goods in his short, fast life in and out of New Orleans, has known corruption, yet his soul remains golden. Lady Torrence, whose racist pig of a husband spends most of the play in a deathbed upstairs, has given up on life. Then Val comes along, takes a job in the general store — and quicker than you can say “loins on fire!” it’s love, sweet love, with a sour punishment awaiting the lovers.
You can see where an actor might be tempted into excess. The great thing about Roman and Key, and the best of their onstage comrades, is their two-track instincts. One track takes care of the emotional fireworks. The other takes care of the moments of introspection — which are rare, granted, but in this staging, they register. Much of the time, on a first-rate set designed by Keith Pitts, Roman and Key converse and circle and eye each other mere inches away from the audience. The proximity eases us into the play.
Even the most outre characters have moments of recognizable human feeling. Cheryl Graeff, apparently on an Elizabeth Ashley “Crazy Cracker” scholarship, manages to enact the half-mad, sensually hungry Carol Cutrere in a way that nails the right kind of laughs — she makes her a creature of darting glances and rapid-fire patter — without reducing her to caricature. The role of Sheriff Talbott, a string-’em-up archetype of banal evil, becomes a more nuanced example thereof thanks to John Sterchi.
“They say that a woman can burn a man down,” says Val. “But I can burn down a woman.” It takes a pretty sharp actor to make a line like that sound not funny. The same goes for the woman who tackles Williams’ molto distressed heroine, who begins the play by going to pieces. We know this because she says early on, “I’m going to pieces, you hear me, I’m going to pieces.” Inhabiting that state of extremity without turning into an Italianate cliche — you try it. Roman has, and has succeeded.
You may wish director Kiely had taken Williams’ stylistic nudge toward non-realism more to heart. The repetitive scenes featuring the local biddies could use more urgency and strangeness. But he has done well with a play that has defeated many. It’s fun to see “Orpheus Descending” in this production, if only because the audience doesn’t know it as well as the better known Williams plays. Surprise, surprise: A zesty but human-scaled “Orpheus Descending” has descended on the fall theater season.
“Orpheus Descending”
When: Through Nov. 6
Where: American Theater Company, 1909 W. Byron St. (off Lincoln Avenue)
Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes
Tickets: $25-$30 at 773-929-1031 or www.atcweb.org
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mjphillips@tribune.com
