by Kirby Lindsay, posted 11 February 2013
“The thing I always think about Williams,” director Ellen Graham remarked, “is that he is always, desperately trying to connect people.” Graham knows the works of Tennessee Williams, and she has brought that knowledge to her direction of an evening of one-act plays by the American playwright in ‘5 X Tenn (Or So)’ at Stone Soup Theatre from February 15th – March 9th.
The evening of six short plays (that’s why the ‘or so’ in the title,) features the versatile acting talents of Terrence Boyd, Jesse Putnam, Alysha Curry, Scott Zogg, Patrick Baxter, Gianni Truzzi, Brynne Garman, and Maureen Miko. “He’s not afraid to show people raw and vulnerable and needing love,” Graham observed of Williams’ plays, and that requires acting – and direction – that can access the raw, the vulnerable and the need.
Acting Williams
“There are a select few playwrights around whose words are so beautiful,” acknowledged Zogg, one of the ‘5 X Tenn (Or So)’ actors. Zogg, and many of the actors appearing in this production, is not a Stone Soup regular. Graham cast this production with actors she felt able to handle the lyricism and emotional tumult of Williams’ stories.
“It’s not something everyone can do,” Graham said of performing Williams. She’s seen shows fall into parody (haven’t we all,) as the actors take the larger-than-life, gut-wrenching drama and delicately drawn characters into high-melodrama. “You have to have actors that can be completely honest,” Graham said. She also observed, “you have to be vigilant, and don’t let the accent do all the work for you.”
“I’ve got tremendous actors,” Graham reported, “so versatile, so brave, so patient… This is a long process of discovery.” They’ve rehearsed six days a week for six weeks, and still had a week to go (before a month of performances,) when I spoke with Graham and Zogg.
“They have to be really patient,” Graham acknowledged, “because I’m calibrating.” Williams’ works offer big emotions and big words, “but the space is small,” she observed of Stone Soup’s DownStage. She encourages the actors to find the emotions under the words, and to have the words Williams wrote take the audience where they need to be. “The advantage,” she said of acting these works in the close setting of the DownStage, “is that you can see the actors’ faces, and expressions.”
Speaking Williams
“He’s so beautiful,” Graham remarked about Williams. “I feel he raises the bar for us,” she said, “as writers but also as humans.” She feels strongly about the “poetry” of his plays, and being true to his carefully selected words – to being ‘word perfect’. “This is Williams,” she stated, and she wants her actors, “to have that level of respect to remember the words as he wrote them.”
Zogg agrees with this assessment, and has worked to be word perfect because, he said, “it’s really important because of how wonderful it is.” Tennessee Williams, and his stories of human struggles and feelings, can be dismissed as as women’s fare, but Zogg said that as a man he also enjoys them. “As screwed up as a lot of us men are,” he said, not I, “we do carry those emotions. It’s good to find plays that have that.”
Selecting Williams
“The characters are very deep, and very carefully drawn,” Zogg observed about Williams’ longer works, “It’s difficult to draw a character that deeply in one act, but he does.” Stone Soup produces one-acts to give audiences access to often overlooked works, and the prolific Williams offers a treasure trove to choose from.
For her first directing job at Stone Soup, Graham deferred to the choice of plays by the theater’s founder, Maureen Miko – at first. “Maureen had some for me to read,” Graham explained, “The ones she gave me to read, I loved, and we looked at some collections to round out the evening.”
She hasn’t chosen six random works that have a playwright in common. Graham purposefully selected works that “make sense as an evening,” she said. Yet, she also found plays that show the range of the playwright, with two set in a post-apocalyptic future that Graham sees as prescient. “We’ve got a comic relief after two wrenching ones,” she observed, with the fifth play offering, “lovely poetry,” and the sixth displaying the heart that Williams wrote so well, “like a really old movie,” Graham said.
The plays selected – ‘The Municipal Abattoir,’ ‘Chalky White Substance,’ ‘Sunburst,’ ‘Kingdom Of Earth,’ ‘Talk To Me Like The Rain And Let Me Listen,’ and ‘The Big Game’ – Graham described as, “really diverse, but somehow,” she said, “they come together.”
To enjoy this evening of Tennessee Williams, and six plays rarely seen but worth a watch, order tickets now. Performances take place Thursdays – Sundays, February 15th – March 9th, with Thursdays as Pay-What-You-Can. Tickets can be purchased through Brown Paper Tickets, or through the Stone Soup box office at 206/633-1883. Also note, with one performance already sold out, it might be best to order in advance.
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©2013 Kirby Lindsay. This column is protected by intellectual property laws, including U.S. copyright laws. Reproduction, adaptation or distribution without permission is prohibited.