Orpheus Descending – Tennessee Williams, 1957 ★★½

Hot for the Hired Help

Some authors test your tolerance for excess. Because they work at a higher pitch than more realistic writers, you know better than complain when that approach comes off as a bit extreme, even for them.

Tennessee Williams didn’t write normal plays, whatever those are. He wrote plays about desperate, decadent people struggling for love trapped in social orders that refuse to understand or accept them. Understand this, and you can see Orpheus Descending for what it is, a template for everything that followed in his glorious career.

For that, it is fascinating and revealing. Never mind it is a hot mess, too.

Lady Torrance is the wife of the dying owner of a small-town mercantile store somewhere in the Old South. Folks are mean here, so when a rough young man comes into town looking to work at the store, his being an outsider is a plus to her. So are his good looks and snug pants.

Hattie Morahan as Lady and Seth Numrich as Val in a 2019 revival of the play at Menier Chocolate Factory in London. Val's snakeskin jacket draws a lot of attention. "It's sort of a trademark," he explains.
Image by Tristram Kenton from https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/may/16/orpheus-descending-review-menier-chocolate-factory-hattie-morahan

Val is hot stuff, alright. Just ask him:

VAL: [grinning] Well, they say that a woman can burn a man down. But I can burn down a woman.

LADY: Which woman?

VAL: Any two-footed woman.

This magnetism turns out good for business, drawing female customers to the store. He’s good for Lady, too, giving her a second chance at life long after she sunk into despair. But because it’s Tennessee Williams, nothing good ever lasts, and when it falls apart, it will go down in flames. Cue one of the biddies who oversees the town: “An awful thought. But a true one. Most awful thoughts are.”

Orpheus Descending was a play with many lives. In a short introduction, “The Past, The Present, And The Perhaps,” Williams explains how it flopped in Boston in 1940 under the title Battle Of Angels, setting back his promising career. But he kept plugging away at it.

“It never went into the trunk, it always stayed on the workbench, and I’m not presenting it now because I’ve run out of ideas or material for completely new work,” he wrote.

The play takes its title from the Greek myth of the musician Orpheus and his lover Eurydice, whom he rescues from the underworld only to lose her when he disobeys the gods. That same sense of doom hangs over the play.
Painting 'Orpheus' by Peter Paul Rubens from https://www.historytoday.com/archive/foundations/orpheus-and-eurydice

Williams was on top of the world in 1957; he didn’t need a reclamation project. As he goes on to say in his introduction, this was a labor of love. He describes Orpheus Descending as “a sort of emotional bridge” between who he was early on and what he became.

The first thing you notice is the play’s ambition. In the prologue alone, we learn the whole story about Lady, her lost romance, her husband slowly dying upstairs, and how long ago he helped burn her father to death in punishment for serving alcohol to black customers:

DOLLY: How could she live in a marriage twenty years with a man if she knew he’d burned her father up in a wine garden?

That Lady really does not know this seems a bit of a reach, but that is exactly the case in this play. It also taxes belief why she would stay in such a community. But never mind, you need it for the play to work.

Vanessa Redgrave played Lady in a 1989 production that marked her successful return to Broadway. Here she puts on a party dress for Kevin Anderson as Val, who exclaims: "We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!"
Image from https://newyorktheater.me/2020/08/23/v-is-for-vanessa-redgrave-her-broadway-career-in-photos/redgrave-with-kevin-anderson-in-orpheus-descending/

If Lady is the engine, Val is the piston to make things go. Williams pushes the point that Val is a reluctant object of lust, who stoically endures the indignity of women coming on to him at the store. He just wants to play his guitar and have a place to sleep:

VAL: Heavy drinking and smoking the weed and shacking with strangers is okay for kids in their twenties but this is my thirtieth birthday and I’m all through with that route.

In Lady, he finds a woman who values him for his decency and enjoys his “peculiar” conversation. Her only alternative for company is a husband she doesn’t like even without knowing he murdered her father. For a time, Val settles in at the mercantile store. Gossip builds, but so does business as middle-aged women come in to chat up Val. Lady doesn’t care about the gossip, but she wants the business. She has plans.

But Val sees something special in Lady, and in time, the two give into urges neither sees much point in containing. Disaster ensues.

Tennessee Williams as a young man. When the play closed in Boston in 1940 (under its original title Battle Of Angels), Williams recalled exclaiming: "You don't seem to see that I put my heart into this play."
Image from https://www.picturethispost.com/raven-theatre-2017-2018-season-preview/  

I see why Williams kept working on this play; there is a lot of personality and substance in it. So much energy is packed into each scene. There are undertones of later, more widely celebrated plays of his like The Rose Tattoo and A Streetcar Named Desire, and an ending that seems to have filtered more logically into that of Sweet Bird Of Youth.

The ingredients are there; what’s missing are the proportions. People do a lot of soliloquizing about life and what it all means, and their thoughts are eloquent and worthwhile. They just come out of nowhere, and keep on coming:

CAROL: Take me out to Cypress Hill in my car. And we’ll hear the dead people talk. They do talk there. They chatter together like birds on Cypress Hill, but all they say is one word and that one word is “live,” they say, “Live, live, live, live, live!” It’s all they’ve learned, it’s the only advice they can give. – Just live…

Carol Cutrere is another character I feel certain Williams did not want to let go of. Carol once agitated for the rights of black citizens until the town threw her out. Now she is back, spiritually broken and just desperate for a good time with Val, not caring how conspicuous she is about it.

Lois Smith as Carol pleads for attention from Cliff Robertson as Val in the original 1957 Broadway production. "What on earth can you do but catch at whatever comes near you with both your hands until your fingers are broken…" Carol says to him.
 Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/380694974751869695/

Carol feels extraneous to the course of this play, except maybe to shine a light on how small-minded and bigoted the town is. But Lady exposes this, too, and Carol’s presence (and that of her brother, Lady’s former flame, who makes a brief appearance) pulls the play away from what seems the best angle for dramatic suspense, Lady versus the town.

It is only in the middle of the play that the Lady story dominates. By then, I was already worn down by all the emotional carnage. Lady is a fine character, an Italian immigrant who knows her way around the town by ignoring what they say about her. Her interactions with Val give both real class and a rooting interest, Williams at his quiet best.

I think he overdoes the townspeople for their varying degrees of rottenness, but it is real fun seeing them sent up. The sheriff’s loopy wife Vee dashes off religious portraits that excite her nearly as much as Val does, while a harpy whines at Lady letting Carol in her store: “You can’t ostracize a person out of this county unless everybody cooperates.”

Maureen Stapleton as Vee shows off a painting while Marlon Brando as Val looks on, in 1960's The Fugitive Kind, a film adaptation of Orpheus Descending. Stapleton played Lady when Orpheus made its Broadway debut, opposite Cliff Robertson as Val.
Image from http://jamesgrissom.blogspot.com/2014/02/maureen-stapleton-on-marlon-brando.html

Val needed more work, I think. He’s the most stereotypical character in this play of stereotypes, an aimless drifter with an artistic soul. As this was just the sort of man Williams was attracted to in real life, I understand his being part of the play, but he lacks any reason for hanging around. He even says so: “Somehow or other I can’t get used to this place, I don’t feel safe in this place, but I – want to stay…”

I guess he wants to stay for Lady though he knows it to be a dangerous mistake, what with her crazy dying husband upstairs and a town full of judgmental, lynch-happy people. People follow their hearts in the plays of Tennessee Williams, and chance the consequences, and this is what you get here, even if it is more about consequences and less about heart.

It gave Williams a sense of direction that served him well. “The future is called ‘perhaps,’ which is the only possible thing to call the future,” he writes in his introduction. “And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you.” Those are words to live by, even if doing so offers only heartache and ruin to the protagonists of Orpheus Descending.