Tiger Tail
Tiger Tail
By Tennessee Williams
Directed by Frank Hilgenberg
Starring Brenna Arden Warden, Frank Casado, and Tim Bass
Theatre Downtown, Orlando FL</strong>
Summer is here and what better time for a hot, sweaty sex drama from everyone’s favorite Dixieland playwright? Sexy Baby Doll (Warden) was married off to slovenly Archie Lee Meighan (bass) on the condition of no hanky panky till she turned twenty. While he waits and drinks his liver away, the cotton ginning business has collapsed even since the Syndicate Plantation built a new state of the art facility. (I think it has a gasoline engine.) Rather than get into an expensive technology war, Archie takes a 5 gallon can of gas and burns the problem to the ground and then browbeats Baby Doll into forgetting he went out that night. When smoldering Silva Vacarro (Casada) arrives with 27 wagons of cotton, he’s not just looking for agricultural services or the root cause of the fire, he’d prefer some moral vengeance, and Baby doll is ready to oblige him.
This may be Tim Bass’s best performance ever; he’s got everything down but the smell of Archie’s dimwitted loutishness. As he drinks more and more his stumbles and slurs are exactly what you’d expect from a drunk daddy, and after his half-baked scheme falls apart, he dimly eventually catches on to how he really got screwed. Meanwhile the lust between Baby Doll and Mr. Vacarro is a formidable presence on stage; there were times when we should have averted our eyes had the lighting not respectfully dimmed itself. Mr. Casado’s role is an odd one in the Williams universe, he’s the ethnic outcast that fits into neither the Whiter-Than-Irish domineering class, yet for technical reasons he’s can’t be despised as a Negro. Thus, he’s just one more challenge to the accepted order of gracious southern decay, and no one knows quite what to do with him except of course Mrs. Baby Doll Meighan. Supporting this wobbly triangle is Sarah Benz Phillips as put upon Aunt Rose, she does the cooking and cleaning and handles all the abuse Baby Doll can’t absorb, and she screams at the ringing of a phone. I sympathize with her more than anyone else tonight.
All this lust for life rolls out on a cluttey and authentic set courtesy of Mike McRee, I couldn’t smell the mice but everything else was there from the busted bushel basket to a live hand pumped water system. Even though this show was originally a film, it seems to have less production baggage than other Williams show and director Hilgenberg allows the action to fill the space with all the menace and bitter chemistry the South can produce. My only complaint is a few non Chekhovian weapons; a gun is fired at a never identified menace but was strangely absent from the last act. This is one of Williams most straight forward stories, the internal monologue of everyone on stage is “When can I get some?” and the answer is “Right about now.” Go get yours.
For more information on Theatre Downtown, please visit http://www.theatredowntown.net