Phillyist Reviews... Something Cloudy, Something Clear

No doubt about it: Tennessee Williams was one of the greatest writers whose work graced the Twentieth Century American stage. A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Glass Menagerie are all plays we read in high school or college English and drama classes. They're oft-performed and there have been several movie versions produced of each. So with all the familiarity we as a collective culture have with these and other Williams plays (Suddenly Last Summer, The Night of the Iguana...), it makes little sense that EgoPo Productions, in their year-long Tennessee Williams festival, would choose to outsource Williams' best-known work to other theatre companies for staged readings, and produce two of his least-known, most autobiographical, and, dare I say, most self-indulgent, plays in their stead.

To be sure, there was a lot to praise about EgoPo's production of Vieux Carre in November. But following it up with the similarly-obscure, similarly-structured Portrait of the Artist as a Young Fag (I don't use the term lightly, but it's used often enough in the show), Something Cloudy, Something Clear, makes not a lot of sense, especially considering that this is surely one of Williams' weaker, more confounding scripts.

As far as I can tell, Something Cloudy is about August (Kelly Groves), a playwright not unlike Williams, who is spending his days during the summer of 1940 writing on a beach in Province Town, and his nights drinking himself into oblivion and picking up strange men. Enter Kip (Sean Lally) and Clare (Alice Whitley), two drifter/dancers looking to be kept. And they've decided that August, whose latest play is set to open on Broadway, should be their keeper. A pretty straightforward plot, not out of the realm of Williams' sometimes lascivious sensibilities, to be sure—until you discover that the play is actually set in 1980 and you're watching a series of flashbacks during which a Greek chorus of characters from Williams'/August's past materializes onstage, breaks the fourth wall or mumbles something incoherently, and then leaves the scene to go back to normal. Williams was always at his best when he was at his most realistic, and it's little wonder that this dream-like world of memory isn't nearly as pathologically effective as his better-known plays. Only in the second act, where the ghosts of the past visit less frequently and the scenes proceed with less interruption and more narrative, does the play even come close to "working."

The show is ultimately flawed, and despite the efforts of director Brenna Geffers and the rest of the Something Cloudy cast, the show is almost destined to fail before the lights come up at the top of the show. It's not that it's a bad production, by any means—it's just that, and it pains me to say this about the work of Tennessee Williams, when your material is that bad from the git-go, you can only elevate it so high during the production. Otherwise, you're left with competent actors stumbling their way through a dreamland that reads more like a snore fest.

Clichéd as it may be, perhaps Streetcar would have been a better choice.

Sean Lally as Kip and Kelly Groves as August in EgoPo Productions' Something Cloudy, Something Clear, running through March 22 at the Adrienne Theatre. Photo by Cory Frisco.