the making of blanche dubois
by Douglas Messerli
Tennessee Williams (screenplay, based on his rewrite of Summer
and Smoke), Glenn Jordan (director) The Eccentricities of a
Nightingale / 1976 (TV movie)
The other day I watched a filmed version of a production of
Williams’ little-known play (based on a production at either the Louisville
Actor’s Theatre or the Old Globe in San Diego—both are named at different
sites). The Eccentricities is a rewrite of his Summer
and Smoke, but the characters behave quite differently than they do in the
former play and the tone is completely different, as Williams himself noted,
far less melodramatic and certainly less symbolic that Summer and Smoke,
first performed a year after his great A Streetcar Named Desire.
One recognizes immediately, in fact,
this play’s close relationship with Streetcar, whose central
character, Alma Winemiller (Blythe Danner), shares many similarities with
Blanche Dubois, and perhaps gives us a glimpse of some of the forces behind the
over-the-top figure of Williams’ earlier play (Summer and Smoke, in
earlier versions, however, predated A Streetcar).
What is also apparent
is that the still beautiful but virginal Alma is— in a word the play itself
uses to describe her—almost hysterical, using any reason to swallow down the
small white pills the doctor has prescribed for her (probably just placebos).
Her father, in fact, attempts, to have a heart-to-heart talk with her in the
very next scene, now Christmas, about her fluttering hands, her exaggerated
gestures and speech, and—the most comical of accusations—her penchant for feeding
birds in the town square. She is getting the reputation of an “eccentric.”
Despite her father’s stern warnings, however, Alma stands up for her own
behavior quite strongly, and we realize that despite the tensions of her home
life, she has attempted to play role of a supporting daughter quite ably. Yet
she is hurt, feels shunned by the local community, particularly when local
carolers visit the Buchanan house but turn away from the Winemiller home. Alma
seeks solace in a small gathering of town would-be intellectuals, odd people
who mostly have inflated egos, confusing Blake with Rimbaud, and writing
endlessly long verse plays. Only Alma, of the group, seems to know anything
about poetry or literature.
She invites Buchanan—who has again
returned for a stay in Glorious Hill—to the gathering which ends in unpleasant
bickering among the group and, once more, the young doctor’s being led off by
his mother, who has a very different view of whom her beloved son will marry.
The scene with the two of them,
mother and son, in the Buchanan home is as close to love scene as the young
doctor ever gets. Mrs. Buchanan clearly is the smothering type, who continues
to control his life. Yet despite his mother’s interference, he has managed to
make a date with Alma, whom he admires for her intelligence and the exciting
flashes of change that run across her face. Her very eccentricities, he
observes, is what makes her so special, so different from all the other women
he has met and certainly sets her apart from any woman his might wish him to
marry.
Langella plays this scene, as well
as others, with a kind of gentle passivity that almost angered me: why doesn’t
he speak out, speak up for what he sees in Alma? Why can’t he show some
anger at his mother’s bourgeois visions for his future life? Instead, he merely
answers with quiet irony and, we later perceive, coded phrases that make him
appear detached.
Alma is fearful when evening arrives
for their date that he won’t show, and when he does, she is almost overwhelmed
with a kind of energized force, telling him after the movie of her life-long
love for him. She even suggests that they go someplace for sex, to which he
demurs. Alma admits that she does not expect this friendship to any further,
but if she only she might have one night, a whole evening to remember… Again he
demurs, but finally agrees to take her to a hotel that specializes in just such
encounters. Once there, however, it becomes apparent that nothing will happen.
What doesn’t get said is quite obvious: the young doctor is gay, disinterested
in sex with a woman. Alma perceives the situation immediately. And in the last
scene of the play, described as an epilogue, we see her seated on the same park
bench where she sat early in the play. She has aged. When she encounters a
young salesman, she begins a conversation, suggesting that they visit the same
hotel. Apparently, she has now found regular companions for the one-night
encounters she had sought out.
This might almost be a reincarnation
or glimpse of an earlier Blanche Dubois, the young woman of entitlement, given
to romantic notions of the world, but also desirous of the pleasures of sex.
Like Blanche, her first love turns out to be a homosexual, unable to give her
what she desires. Alma has already begun on the long downward spiral where
Blanche ends, in the arms of a teenage boy in a similar seedy hotel.
Danner’s performance as Alma is splendid,
and her stunning portrayal of Williams’ “eccentric nightingale” brings this
play to life in a way that Summer and Smoke, with its smoldering
old maid at the center, never achieves. I might even go so far, after watching
this excellent TV production, as to suggest that Eccentricities
of a Nightingale is one of Williams’ best works.
Los Angeles, October 6, 2012
Reprinted from USTheater,
Opera, and Performance (October 2012).
