Orpheus Descending
Orpheus Descending
By Tennessee Williams
Directed by Tara Rewis
Starring Leesa Castaneda, Andy Matchett, and Vera Varlamov
Dark Side of Saturn Theater
Presenting at the Orlando Shakespeare Center, Orlando, FL</strong>
Just as Orpheus went into hell for love, Val Xavier (Matchett) wanders into Two Rives County, although with less skill and planning than that ancient Greek. Carol Cutrere (Varlamov) drives people in and out of town even as her family pays her to stay away. She chases the checks and crashes the cars and while she’s pretty fast, she’s not fast enough to save Val. But he’s made a commitment: he hides his guitar and stashes his snake skin jacket and sells merchandise for the despised Italian Lady Torrance (Castaneda). Her husband Jabe (Bret Carson) is jealous, suspicious and near the end of his life, and he’s buddies with the Sherriff (Jay Glass) and the local goon squad Dog and Pee Wee (Benjamin Dupree and Simon McDonald). They decide who lives or stays, and outsiders are not encouraged in this club. And there’s the problem: nowhere in the south does “Liberty and Justice for All” mean anything other than “beat it if you’re the least bit different.”
Between the simmering romance and the violent racism there are tons of bullets to dodge if you sit in the front row. Lady is trapped, despised and abandoned, but not to the point she can make any changes in her life. She even begs Nurse Porter (Marcie Schwalm) for a little extra morphine to “help” Jape avoid pain. Schwalm looks down her nose and defends “Jabe is not an animal.” We could argue, but the message is clear: we are here to suffer pain, and cheats that diminish it are against God’s will. Meanwhile Mr. Matchett is suave and good looking and he could easily lead a rockabilly band to success, but here he’s in over his head. He arrived in a car with a broken axel, and it’s never referred to again. Has he really abandoned his only hope for exiting this town, or is the illicit sex enough to keep him on? I was especially fond of Ms. Varlamov; she seemed immune to the petty battles around her and had no qualms about driving all night to New Orleans, a city which offered her more opportunity except for that business of her monthly allowance. And while Dog and Pee Wee were violent, they kept a lid on their violence but Glass’s Sherriff was under no restraints, he yelled and bluster at every one and every opportunity.
“Orpheus Descending” is one of Williams’s better scripts but it’s not done often. True, it has a huge cast and has two intermissions, but stay true to with Williams’s themes of Southern corruption, missed love and brutality. It fun to line up the cast with the original legend; the boatman, the three headed dog and Orpheus himself are all easily identifiable. This is a must for Tennessee Williams fans, it’s well-constructed, well-acted and flies by faster than its run time indicates. And if we can lean one thing about the south it’s this: stay away from small towns, stick to the interstate, or better yet, just fly over it.
For more information on Dark Side of Saturn Theater, please visit https://www.facebook.com/SideofSaturn
