A year ago, when Tennessee Williams’ most checkered play returned to New York with Denver native Mary Bacon in the leading role, there was an uncommon consensus of critical opinion:
It’s time to reconsider “The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.”
Perhaps you, too, dread revisiting Williams’ endless menagerie of absurdly (and similarly) wounded women. While creating great roles for female actors, he perpetuated the stereotype that subjugated, repressed women of the South were all so crippled with delusion or self-doubt that they were incapable of drawing their own breath.
“Eccentricities” began in 1945 as a flop called “Summer and Smoke.” Williams tinkered with it for so long that by the time it debuted on Broadway as “Eccentricities” in 1976, few gave it a clean slate of consideration. Ironic that, in the throes of women’s liberation, it went unappreciated that here was perhaps Williams’ most feminist play.
Oh, it’s got a couple of doozies in the damaged-goods department. Alma, the nightingale, is one broken bird. The minister’s daughter is an unmarried voice teacher who’s labeled an “eccentric” for her emotional outbursts and panic attacks. Like a lot of Williams’ women, she has no prospects. No choice but to endure for the sake of endurance.
But, if anything, annoying Alma endures too hard. Determined to turn this town into another Athens, she gathers a gaggle of misfits that’s a cross between “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and Dorothy Parker’s Vicious Circle. We can see why she’s such a joke.
What makes Alma’s unspoken heart race (and her lungs collapse) is her passion for childhood friend John Buchanan, a young medical researcher who’s drawn to Alma in much the same way he’s fascinated by bacteria. He’s handsome, smart and, of course, bound by the Williams Constitution to be incapable of loving Alma in return.
(Spoiler alert.) But what separates Alma, from, say, “The Glass Menagerie’s” Laura Wingfield (you can’t escape that bird metaphor) is that Alma musters the courage to ask John point-blank for what she wants. And that makes her suitor’s answer as irrelevant as it is inevitable. Unlike all the others, Alma is resilient. And that’s what makes “Eccentricities” soar.
Gina Wencel anchors a strong staging by Germinal-Stage Denver with a vulnerable performance that swings from intentional affectation to naked truth. By leaving the audience believing that this bird might actually fly out of the nest as a strong, independent woman, she transforms a play that’s almost cliche in its initial melancholy into something positively groundbreaking.
She’s aided by Ed Baierlein’s certain direction and a deep supporting cast led by an effectively grounded Brian Landis Folkins as John, and Erica Sarzin-Borrillo as Alma’s prototypically unstable mother. She’s been forced into semi-seclusion since her sister’s death 15 years before.
I was asked after Sunday’s performance how teens might respond to this production. My knee-jerk reaction was to say this is the kind of theater that might bore them to tears.
Then I thought about Alma’s timeless affliction: She loves someone she’ll never have. Or, worse, she might have him — but only for a moment. She’s in a prison that elicits some of Williams’ most potent late-career writing. Lines like“Give me (an) hour, and I’ll make a lifetime of it” land with desperate impact.
Alma’s really no more an “eccentric” than Laura Wingfield is a true cripple. But when a label has been ingrained in you for so long, it becomes a disease of self-perception.
And what kid can’t relate to that?
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
“The Eccentricities of a Nightingale”
Southern-Goth Girl Power. Presented by Germinal Stage-Denver, 2450 W. 44th Ave. Written by Tennessee Williams. Directed by Ed Baierlein. Starring Gina Wencel and Brian Landis Folkins. Through May 10. 2 hours, 5 minutes. 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays. $17.75- $21.75 ($15 walk-up May 1-3 only). 303-455-7108 or
