Theatre in Review: Small Craft Warnings (Mother of Invention/Theatre Row)

	Adam Dodway and Austin Pendleton. Photo: Jason Jung

It's going to be a good year for Tennessee Williams completists. This is the playwright's centennial, and already three of his lesser-known works -- by which I mean flops - are on the boards in New York. The Roundabout has The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, the play that signaled the beginning of his long and spectacular decline. The Wooster Group is busy deconstructing Vieux Carré, his sad, penultimate Broadway disaster. And, on Theatre Row, you can check out Small Craft Warnings, which had a brief run Off Broadway in 1972.

While hardly a hit, Small Craft Warnings has proved more durable than many of Williams' later efforts. The original production earned one of Clive Barnes' famous backhanded compliments ("This is not a major Tennessee Williams play, but it will certainly do until the next one comes along, and I suspect it may survive better than some of the much touted products of his salad years.") Elaine Stritch apparently had something of a personal success with it in London. And, as a quick Google search reveals, it has received far more revivals in recent years than, say, The Seven Descents of Myrtle or Slapstick Tragedy. And yet, as much as any other of his works from this era, it shows exactly why Williams' star fell so precipitously.

Small Craft Warnings has a classic setup, in which the denizens of a seedy Southern California community gather in their local bar to immunize themselves nightly against the pain of living. They include Violet, a pathetic, addled creature who ekes out a subsistence living by giving out hand jobs under the table; Doc, a drunken old sawbones who practices without a license; Bill McCorkle, a preening, cruel young stud who mooches off needy older women; and Leona, Bill's current bedmate, a boozy, garrulous, aging beautician, who, after a drink or seven, has plenty to say about the human condition. (Among other things, Leona is in perpetual mourning for her younger brother, a homosexual who died young, apparently being too delicate for this cruel world.) Wandering in from the fog are Priest Quentin, a jaded, middle-aged screenwriter, and Bobby, the young man he just picked up. By the time they appear, things have already gone sour; Quentin has a taste for rough trade, and his libido is deflated when he realizes Bobby is willing. The action, such as it is, is a kind of long, dark night of the soul, with each character baring, largely in monologues, the corrosive effects of loneliness on his or her soul. This kind of barroom format has proved useful in the hands of many playwrights, but here Williams is only interested in letting them talk and talk and talk until closing time.

For Small Craft Warnings is Exhibit A in what went wrong with Williams' career. His early plays sizzled with dramatic tension. Both The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire feature characters packed into such close quarters that the only possible outcome is an explosion of some kind. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a cannily plotted drama about family infighting over the contents of a will. Even later works like Sweet Bird of Youth and The Night of the Iguana, although more casually plotted, still pack real dramatic power from the conflicts between the lead characters. But, in what he often defended as a search for a more poetic form of theatre, Williams abandoned narrative for long prose-poem plays that are too dramatically slack to have any impact.

Along with this came a growing impoverishment of language. Perhaps because he wrote so compulsively, moving from one work to the next, the words became more flaccid, more maudlin, almost a parody of the author's best work. "I wish my heart could vomit up the mistakes and memories of a lifetime," says Leona in one of her more sodden moods. Later, she notes, "Everybody needs one beautiful thing in their life to save the heart from corruption." A little bit of this goes a long way; put words like these into the mouths of half a dozen characters and you're really pushing your luck.

In a script that focuses on the sordid details of everything, from dirty fingernails to gonorrhea to botched childbirth, the most gripping passages in the play have to do with what Leona calls "the sickness and the sadness" of the gay scene. Gay pride happened too late for Williams, and so Quentin muses, "There's a coarseness, a deadening coarseness, in the experience of most homosexuals. The experiences are quick, and hard, and brutal, and the pattern of them is practically unchanging. Their act of love is like the jabbing of a hypodermic needle to which they're addicted but which is more and more empty of real interest and surprise." (Those theatre-goers who complain about the allegedly politically incorrect presentation of gay life in the roughly contemporaneous The Boys in the Band are in for a shock if they attend Small Craft Warnings.)

This combination of stasis and purple language is more than enough to turn Small Craft Warnings into a soporific experience, a triple shot of cheap booze that knocks you out, just like that. Austin Pendleton, a director of enormous skill -- he even did something with Vieux Carré, at the Pearl Theatre, two years ago -- does his best here. Working with the members of the company known as Mothers of Invention, he presents the script as a kind of concert version, with no real set and minimal lighting. It's instructive in a way, as it allows us to concentrate solely on the words, but it also exposes the poverty of the material.

Pendleton, by far the most experienced member of the cast, takes on the role of Quentin, and handles the character's bitter words with skill. Everyone else does their best, with Gina Stahlnecker struggling to infuse Leona's nonstop speeches with some dramatic energy. (What I would give to see what Stritch did with the role!) Tammy Lang's Violet is a disturbingly sad creation.

But, nearly 40 years later, Walter Kerr's verdict, "a work of obvious immobility," still stands. The sad truth is, when Williams gave up being a dramatist, he lost a crucial part of what made him a distinctive artist.--David Barbour