TENNESSEE WILLIAMS: PLAYWRIGHT, POET - Goodman Theatre

24 Pages·2012·4.11 MB·English

March – May 2012
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS:
PLAYWRIGHT, POET, DREAMER
A JOURNEY INTO “BIEITOLAND”:
INTRODUCING THE UNCONVENTIONAL
WORLD OF DIRECTOR CALIXTO BIEITO
A Conversation with Fish Men
Playwright Cándido Tirado
March – May 2012
CONTENTS
VOLUME 27 #3
Co-Editors | Lesley Gibson, Lori Kleinerman,
Tanya Palmer
In the Albert
Graphic Designer | Tyler Engman
1 Why Camino Real? Production Manager | Lesley Gibson
2 Tennessee Williams: Playwright, Poet, Dreamer
Contributing Writers/Editors | Neena
7 Tennessee in Chicago Arndt, Jeff Ciaramita, Jeffrey Fauver, Lisa
8 A Journey into “Bieitoland”: Introducing the Unconventional World Feingold, Katie Frient, Lesley Gibson, Lori
of Director Calixto Bieito Kleinerman, Caitlin Kunkel, Dorlisa Martin,
Julie Massey, Tanya Palmer, Teresa Rende,
Victoria Rodriguez, Denise Schneider, Steve
In the Owen
Scott, Jenny Seidelman, Willa J. Taylor,
12 A Conversation with Cándido Tirado Kate Welham.
15 For Love or Money: The World of Chess Hustling
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In the Wings
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17 Imparting Culture and Communication: A Conversation with Ira Abrams
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Why Camino Real?
During my tenure as artistic director I have had the privilege of bringing some of the most notable directors now work-
ing on the world stage to the Goodman, including Peter Sellars, JoAnne Akalaitis, Ivo van Hove, Elizabeth LeCompte,
Flora Lauten (from the esteemed Cuban company Teatro Buendía) and our own Mary Zimmerman. Although vastly
different in style and approach, these directors share a passion for exploring new ways of theatrical storytelling, an
uncompromising singularity of vision and a radical (and often controversial) way of reimagining classical texts. To this
group I am extremely proud to add Calixto Bieito, a Barcelona-based director whose soaring, radical interpretations
of everything from classic operas to Shakespeare have astonished, inflamed and challenged audiences throughout
Europe and South America.
My first experience with Calixto’s work came in 2004, with his sexually charged interpretation of Mozart’s The
Abduction from the Seraglio in Berlin. I found that production to be both fascinating and disturbing; Calixto’s inves-
tigation of the dark subtext that lay beneath the “classical” exterior of the piece displayed a courage and sophistica-
tion that was, to me, profound and unsettling. Soon after the performance I met with him, and was immediately
impressed by his warmth, intelligence and infectious passion for his work. When we began to discuss possible
projects that might be of interest to him, he revealed his love for the works of one of my favorite writers, Tennessee
Williams. Though our conversation began with a discussion of Williams’ better-known works, in talking to Calixto
it occurred to me that his bold artistry might be better used to explore one of Williams’ less often performed plays,
Camino Real. First produced in 1953, Camino remains one of the author’s most poetic works, and one of his most
ambitious: it is an impressionistic musing on the nature of love, loss, humanity and the encroachment of time,
peopled largely by iconic figures of romance who are coming to terms with their own mortality. Because of its non-
realistic milieu and aching lyricism, I felt that this seldom-produced work, long considered one of Williams’ most
personal, would inspire Calixto to do what he does best: to create a world in which the playwright’s images and ideas
could take flight and soar. After reading the play, Calixto agreed, and the result is a full-bodied, extraordinarily theatri-
cal piece which fuses Williams’ poetry, music and evocative imagery to create, in Williams’ words, “the continually
dissolving and transforming images of a dream.”
Although Camino Real is notably based less in realism than its author’s more familiar works, it shares with those
plays a highly charged blend of disparate elements: beauty and brutality; moments of romance punctuated by shock-
ing dissolution. As interpreted by one of today’s most courageous and uncompromising directors, I guarantee that its
vivid images and haunting, sometimes squalid beauty will live with you for a long, long time.
Robert Falls
Artistic Director
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Tennessee Williams:
Playwright, Poet, Dreamer
By Neena Arndt
In the foreword to his phantasmagoric theater and film in the mid-twentieth
1953 allegory, Camino Real, playwright century. This style supplanted melodra-
Tennessee Williams, who by then had ma, which saw its heyday in the nine-
made a name for himself with psychologi- teenth century and took its last fluttery
cal dramas like A Streetcar Named Desire breaths in the middle of the twentieth,
and The Glass Menagerie, wrote, “More when writers like Tennessee Williams,
than any other work I have done, this Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller trans-
play has seemed to me like a construc- formed the American stage with such
tion of another world, a separate exis- masterworks as Streetcar, Long Day’s
tence.” Casual Williams fans may remain Journey into Night and Death of a
unfamiliar with the dreamlike Camino Salesman. Directly imitating real life had
Real, which differs stylistically from his never been among melodrama’s goals,
better-known works. In fact, those who but now, both on stage and on screen,
know only Williams’ “greatest hits” might many artists aimed to hold up a mirror
be hard-pressed to believe that Camino to the world around them.
Real—broad in scope and sweepingly
ambitious—flowed from the same pen Today, Tennessee Williams is most often
as the classics they cherish. But Camino remembered as one of the writers who
Real springs from the deepest recesses of pioneered this style in America. Indeed,
Williams’ heart and psyche, and offers a the works for which he is best known use
glimpse into the staggering imagination of largely realistic plots and characters to
this multifaceted writer. achieve Williams’ goal of rooting around
the human psyche. Their stories concern
In 1951, two years before Camino Real
premiered, Tennessee Williams became
a household name when 27-year-old SYNOPSIS
Marlon Brando swaggered and shouted
Tennessee Williams’ hauntingly poetic
his way to immortality as Stanley
allegory takes us to a surreal, dead-
Kowalski in the film A Streetcar Named
end town occupied by a colorful col-
Desire. Under the direction of Elia
lection of lost souls anxious to escape
Kazan, Brando portrayed Williams’ most
but terrified of the unknown wasteland
iconic male character as lustful and sen-
lurking beyond the city’s walls. When
suous, giving a grandiose performance
Kilroy, an American traveler and for-
that nonetheless was grounded in the
mer boxer, inadvertently lands in this
realistic acting style of which Brando
netherworld, he sets off on a fantasti-
was a master. An early “method” actor,
cal adventure through illusion and
Tennessee Williams,
Brando was steeped in the theories of
circa 1955. Photo by temptation in an attempt to flee its
visionary Russian director Konstantin
FPG/Archive Photos/ confines—and defy his grim destiny.
Getty Images. Stanislavsky, which permeated American
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“ More than any other work I have references that place it in the twentieth
century—an airplane, for example—the
done, this play has seemed to me like play’s time period remains fluid and
ambiguous. The presence of literary
a construction of another world, characters from different eras reinforces
the notion that the action occurs either in
a separate existence.” many time periods simultaneously, or in
no time period in particular. These liter-
—Tennessee Williams ary characters are joined by characters
who are products of Williams’ imagina-
tion, such as an enigmatic gypsy and a
events that could occur in the real world, ern ladies chatter and preen in rocking freaky faction of “streetcleaners” whose
and their characters confront their prob- chairs while being entertained by a retired job is to remove corpses from the streets.
lems in psychologically realistic ways. Yet, vaudeville performer who has had her
even in these works, Williams’ language eyes pecked out by an oversized bird. In Much of the action centers around Kilroy,
is languidly poetic, and his stage direc- Stairs to the Roof, the characters go on a a newly arrived American whose name is
tions often indicate that he envisioned his whirlwind surreal journey before ascend- inspired by the popular World War II era
works being performed with an undercur- ing symbolic stairs to the roof of an office. graffiti phrase “Kilroy was here.” A prize-
rent of visual and auditory metaphors. In Here, the mirror Williams uses is straight fighter with a “heart as big as a baby’s
A Streetcar Named Desire, for example, out of a fun house—and like those twist- head,” Kilroy first appears to be the all-
Williams indicates that Blanche’s descent ed images that confront us at carnivals, American hero—but the nightmare dream-
into madness is underscored by echoing they provide a different, but equally valid, scape in which he now finds himself
voices and “jungle noises.” If, in the text way of perceiving and making sense of proves more treacherous than any fighting
of Streetcar, Williams is holding a mirror the world. ring. While Kilroy and his fellow inhabit-
up to life, it is a warped mirror, each dis- ants of the town are theoretically free to
tortion meticulously sculpted. The poetic The phrase “camino real” translates from leave, outgoing transportation is sporadic
elements in these works afford readers a Spanish as “royal road,” but in Williams’ and a vast desert wasteland stretches to
glimpse of his wide-ranging sensibilities. play it ironically represents a dead end. the horizon—so setting out on foot seems
But in order to fully appreciate the vast- Camino Real places familiar characters foolhardy. Most of the characters remain
ness of Williams’ dramatic imagination, from literature—such as Don Quixote, stuck in their current situations, both
one has to experience his more overtly Casanova and Lord Byron—in a mythical geographically and emotionally, allowing
surrealistic works like Camino Real, The town in an unspecified Latin American Williams to explore the inner workings of
Gnädiges Fräulein or Stairs to the Roof. country where the “spring of humanity their desperation, and their love for (or
In The Gnädiges Fräulein, a pair of south- has gone dry.” Although the play contains perhaps just attachment to) each other.
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OPPOSITE: Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando in A
Streetcar Named Desire. ©Bettman/CORBIS. BOTTOM:
Denholm Elliot and Elizabeth Seal in a scene from
the Tennessee Williams’ play Camino Real. Photo by
Popperfoto/Getty Images.
Just as they occupy the town, the char- in 1953, theatergoers scratched their “There is not the slightest doubt that Mr.
acters also inhabit the fertile landscape heads over Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Williams has some provocative and high-
of Tennessee Williams’ mind, represent- Godot, another play which places little flown thoughts about love and life, and
ing his experience of the world rather focus on plot—but is now considered he is capable of lyrical and humorous
than the world’s literal outward appear- a staple of the Western canon.) Critic and sometimes utterly earthy writing, but
ance. Prior to Camino Real’s Broadway William Hawkins noted, “The first thing it seems to me that in this instance he
opening in 1953, Williams published an evident about this brave new play of knocked himself out being oblique.”
essay in The New York Times describing Tennessee Williams is that explanations
his thought processes about the play: of it that suit you may not suit anybody Never inclined to scorn or ignore his
else. The playwright has composed his audiences’ reactions to his plays,
M y desire was to give audiences my work in terms of pure emotions. They Williams returned to the typewriter
own sense of something wild and are abstract, without excuse or motiva- after the play opened on Broadway and
unrestricted that ran like water in the tion. What you see and hear is the effect revised the script. The published version
mountains, or clouds changing shape on the heart, of human nature when it reflects the changes he made to help
in a gale, or the continually dissolving is greedy or hilarious or sorry for itself.” audiences enter his admittedly mysteri-
and transforming images of a dream. For other critics, the play inspired less ous world—an added prologue which
This sort of freedom is not chaos nor openmindedness: John McClain opined, sets up the action, and some additional
anarchy. On the contrary, it is the result
of painstaking design, and in this work
I have given more conscious attention
to form and construction than I have
in any work before. Freedom is not
achieved simply by working freely.
When the play premiered on Broadway
in a lavish production by Elia Kazan,
some critics and audiences applauded its
stylistic originality, while others decried
its lack of storyline and expressed confu-
sion regarding Williams’ intentions. (Also
WOMEN’S BOARD
SPONSORS CAMINO REAL
The Goodman Theatre Women’s Board continues
a long tradition of support for exciting and chal-
lenging work with its sponsorship of Camino
Real. Since its formation in 1978, the Women’s
Board has made it part of its mission to spon-
sor a production every season and provide
crucial funding for the Goodman’s Education and
Community Engagement programs.
Goodman Theatre gratefully salutes the Women’s
Board as a Major Production Sponsor of Camino
Real, and is extremely thankful for the dedication
and generosity of its members.
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H scenes. Williams was also careful to In the years following, the revised play spurred audiences to expand their ideas
E note, in an afterword, that due to its reli- went on to numerous regional produc- of what constitutes a play. These writ-
A ance on visual elements, this particular tions (including one at the Goodman in ers employ techniques such as extensive
L play would provide a far more satisfy- 1958), usually receiving mixed reviews. use of symbolism and placing their plays
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ing experience on the stage than on In 1970 it was revived in New York by in no particular place or time. Viewed
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the page. While he acknowledged that the Lincoln Center Repertory Company, through the lens of history, Camino Real
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T some plays are “meant for reading,” he and critic Clive Barnes proclaimed, seems less radical than it did in 1953—
emphasized that text is not always of “There are people who think that Camino though it remains a vivid, visceral peek
primary importance to a play: Real is Tennessee Williams’ best play, into the mind of one of America’s most
and I believe that they are right. It is a complex and beloved playwrights.
Of all the works I have written, this play torn out of a human soul.” Barnes
one was meant most for the vulgarity went on to observe that when the play
of performance. The printed script of a was first produced in 1953, “there were
play is hardly more than an architect’s many who found it obscure. Our stan- BOTTOM: Mundy Spears and Emily Webbe in The Gnädiges
blueprint of a house not yet built or dards of obscurity, like our standards of Fräulein performed as part of WSC Avant Bard’s 2011
Tennessee Continuum. Photo C. Stanley Photography.
built and destroyed. The color, the obscenity, have escalated since those
grace and levitation, the structural dark days of theatrical innocence.” When
pattern in motion, the quick interplay Barnes wrote those words, only 17
HONORING A LEGACY:
of live beings, suspended like fitful years had passed since Camino Real’s
HOPE ABELSON AND
lightning in a cloud, these things are premiere—now, we experience Williams’
CAMINO REAL
the play, not words on paper, nor work at a distance of nearly 60 years. In
thoughts and ideas of an author, those the interim, innovative playwrights like Through its 2011/2012 production of Camino
Real, Goodman Theatre honors the legacy of a
shabby things snatched off basement Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Eugene
true luminary of the Chicago arts world, the late
counters at Gimbel’s. Ionesco and countless others have
Hope Abelson. At the Goodman—as well as
many if not all theaters in Chicago—Hope was
a champion of new work.
“ The playwright has composed his work
Hope began her life in the arts as a performer,
in terms of pure emotions. They are
working as an actress in radio drama. Her
career led her to serve as a producer for several
abstract, without excuse or motivation. Broadway shows. She also founded the American
Friends of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and
What you see and hear is the effect on she was instrumental in the early days of the
League of Chicago Theatres.
the heart, of human nature when it is
In 1953, Hope served as an assistant on the
original production of Camino Real. She was
greedy or hilarious or sorry for itself.”
responsible for daily script changes and she made
herself indispensable to both Tennessee Williams
—William Hawkins, Critic and the play’s director, Elia Kazan. She became a
critical supporter of arts organizations large and
small, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra,
Ravinia Festival, Court Theatre, Victory Gardens
Theater and Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Hope
was an early board member of the Goodman and
also served on the Illinois Arts Council.
The Goodman is grateful to her daughter Katherine
Abelson, a Goodman Women’s Board member,
and Katherine’s husband Robert J. Cornell, for
carrying on this tradition through their support
of our education and community engagement
programs for Camino Real.
Hope Abelson and her daughter Katherine at the Goodman’s Inaugural Gala.
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LEFT: Peg Murray and
Scott Jaeck in Goodman
Theatre’s 1982 pro-
duction of Tennessee
Williams’ A House Not
Meant to Stand. Photo
by Lisa Ebright. BELOW:
Tennessee Williams
and Goodman Theatre
Executive Director Roche
Schulfer outside the
Goodman Studio.
Tennessee and Chicago
By Steve Scott
Although the city most often associated the first annual Joseph Jefferson Awards Williams to expand the play into a longer
with Tennessee Williams’ work was New in 1969. Two years later, Keathley pro- one-act, now entitled A House Not Meant
Orleans (his adopted home and the setting duced the world premiere of Williams’ to Stand, produced in 1981, again in the
of some of his most famous works), it was Out Cry, an experience unfortunately Goodman Studio. Despite some critical
Chicago that gave him his first real suc- marred by the playwright’s erratic behav- misgivings, Williams kept working on the
cess in the theater and that would provide ior—although Williams later admitted, play, encouraged by then-Artistic Director
artistic haven to him late in his career. after the failure of a subsequent New Gregory Mosher; the result was a full-
Williams’ love affair with the Windy City York production with a different director, length version of House, which premiered
began in 1944 with the landmark suc- that the play “was better in Chicago.” on the Goodman mainstage in the spring
cess of The Glass Menagerie, produced Problems also plagued the 1980 premiere of 1982. Now subtitled by the author
at the Civic Theatre prior to its arrival on of Clothes for a Summer Hotel, which “A Gothic Comedy,” the new version
Broadway. Claudia Cassidy, the venerated starred Goodman School of Drama alum- expanded the expressionistic absurdities
critic for the Chicago Tribune, became a na Geraldine Page as the ill-fated Zelda of its earlier drafts, revealing even more
passionate advocate for the play, writing Fitzgerald; although Williams himself was passionately the playwright’s own frustra-
in her initial review that, “it reaches out in better emotional shape, his play was tions with the challenges of aging; as
its tentacles, first tentative, then gripping, greeted with critical disappointment. Richard Christiansen noted in his Chicago
and you are caught in its spell.” Cassidy’s Tribune review, “it is a loud, harsh, bitter
praise, and her continued exhortations Later that year, the playwright embarked pain-filled shriek at the degenerative pro-
to local audiences to support the play, on an alliance with Goodman Theatre cess of life…a tantalizing and frustrating
brought national attention to the work that would result in in his final major creation.” A House Not Meant to Stand
before it had even moved to New York, work for the stage. Some Problems for would be the last production with which
and helped establish Williams as the pre- the Moose Lodge, which was produced Williams himself would be associated;
eminent dramatist of his generation. first in the Goodman Studio as one of tragically, he died nine months later.
three short plays collectively billed as
Thereafter, Williams considered Chicago Tennessee Laughs
to be one of the best theater towns in (a title Williams
the world; in a 1951 letter to Cassidy, apparently loathed),
he urged her to stump for the establish- was a darkly sav-
ment of a strong locally based theater age comedy detail-
community here, exclaiming, “No better ing the travails of
place on Earth!” Touring productions Cornelius and Bella
of his Broadway hits were a staple in McCorkle, an elderly
Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, and, couple dealing with
as local producing companies began to the disintegration
sprout, Williams’ plays were an impor- of their family and
tant part of their repertoire. Director their marriage. The
George Keathley’s first major hit at the reception of Moose
old Ivanhoe Theatre was a much-lauded Lodge was positive
revival of The Rose Tattoo which swept enough to encourage
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A Journey into “Bieitoland”:
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Introducing the Unconventional
World of Director Calixto Bieito
By Tanya Palmer
tion with American actors and designers
on the work of an American playwright.
While some critics accuse Bieito of des-
ecrating classic texts with needlessly
shocking images of violence and sexual-
ity, his work is the result of a conscious
approach to create a visceral connection
between contemporary audiences and
classic works. Theater scholar Maria
Delgado suggests that Bieito’s work con-
sistently asks radical questions about how
and what texts mean to different genera-
tions. In a profile of Bieito in Fifty Key
Theatre Directors, a book that explores
the work of directors from around the
world who “have shaped and pushed
Over the past 15 years, Spanish director of garish white leather sofas, cluttered back the boundaries of theater and per-
Calixto Bieito has earned a reputation drink trolleys and porcelain tigers growl- formance,” Delgado writes, “With the
as a “bad boy” of European theater, ing ominously at passersby; and a pro- classics especially, he has demonstrated
simultaneously admired and reviled duction of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s the ability to reinvent texts, stripping them
for his radical revisionist productions Golden Age classic Life is a Dream, of the legacy of past productions and
of classic operas and dramatic texts. which Bieito staged on a gray sandy set reimagining them for contemporary audi-
His harshest critics have condemned dominated by a giant suspended mirror ences.” This method of “reinventing texts”
his work as “sickening,” “puerile” and which functioned as a “metaphorical often involves working closely with a
“tasteless,” while his advocates describe tool, providing both a dazzling image translator and/or adaptor to cut and rear-
him as a “director of vision and courage, of an elusive world that can never be range canonical works—deleting charac-
an Almodóvar of the opera stage.” His entirely controlled and a commentary on ters and interpolating contemporary musi-
most famous (or infamous) productions a play that continuously questions what cal or cinematic references into the perfor-
include a version of Verdi’s A Masked we mean by ‘reality’ and ‘fiction.’” mance texts, such as a 2004 production
Ball at the English National Opera of King Lear which contained depictions
(in a co-production with the Liceu in Fluent in five languages, Bieito has jug- of violence that were a direct homage to
Barcelona and the Royal Danish Opera) gled a career in his native Spain—where the final sequences of Kill Bill and The
which relocated the mise-en-scene from he was the artistic director of Barcelona’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. For Bieito, this
eighteenth century Sweden to 1970s Teatre Romea from 1999 to 2011—with process of connecting the dramatic text or
Spain and began with a controversial an international career directing primar- opera to the contemporary moment—and
image of a vast public urinal; a staging ily opera around the globe. His work locating himself and his collaborators
of Macbeth (first produced in German for has taken him to Germany, Belgium, the within the work—all begins with an effort
the Salzburg Festival and then restaged United Kingdom, Scandinavia, France, to interpret what the writer was trying to
in Catalan at Teatre Romea) in which the Italy, Switzerland, South America and communicate. Rather than simply laying
characters were cast as mafia dons and Mexico, but his upcoming collaboration on a concept, Bieito’s goal is to create a
molls, monarchs of what one reviewer with the Goodman will mark only the sec- visual and auditory universe that releases
called a “hedonistic, drug and drink- ond time his work will have been seen in the text from the confines of history—thus
fuelled culture with no bounds” on a set the United States, and his first collabora- unlocking its meaning and connecting it
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