Ground Floor Theatre Company’s debut production of three one-act Tennessee Williams plays is a rare opportunity to see some of the American playwright’s earlier work. The three one-act plays, At Liberty, Auto-Da-Fé and This Property is Condemned, provide a compelling snapshot of the playwright’s early writing and excitingly foreshadow his later classics such as The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire.
Each play is like a staged vignette; a portrait of unfulfilled dreams, repressed longing and shattered innocence. In At Liberty, Gloria La Greene (Helena Cielak), a struggling actress, returns home in the early hours of the morning after a night out with a beau. Her mother (Emma Wright) sits waiting for her daughter. Theirs is a strained relationship. Gloria clearly chafes against the control her mother tries to exert over her, dismissing her mother’s concerns about her health. We see here Williams’ preoccupation with the domineering matriarch; an early prototype perhaps for the unforgettable Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie who suffocates her children in her attempts to love them. There are also shades of Blanche Du Bois in Gloria’s character; a woman in her thirties, still unmarried, still unfulfilled, still clinging on to the last remains of her youth and beauty.
In Auto-Da-Fé, we again witness an enmeshed parent-child relationship; this time between a mother and her adult son, Eloi (pronounced El-wah). Eloi (Will Manton) is in his late thirties but still lives at home, working in a post office. He casts judgment on the people who surround him in a rundown, impoverished New Orleans neighbourhood, condemning their licentiousness as if their vices threaten to infect him. Eloi is repressed but he needs to tell his mother something. In his postal worker job, he has come across a ‘dirty’ photo; it is almost too much for Eloi to describe yet Madam Duvenet (Emma Wright) draws the information out of him. Similar to At Liberty, we again see an adult child straining against the cage their mother has placed around them. But Eloi is also trapped in a cage of repressed sexuality and his preoccupation with the ‘filthy’ photo suggests something more. Again, Tennessee Williams shows early signs of the themes, particularly around sexuality, that he would grapple with in his later plays.
The refuge of fantasy is particularly poignant in the final play of the show, This Property is Condemned. Two children, Willie (Helena Cielak) and Tom (Will Manton), on the threshold of puberty, play by railway tracks. They seem to know each other but have lost touch. Their conversation reveals Willie’s broken family life; her mother has taken off with a man and her sister, who supported the family through sex work (although this is never said overtly), has died. The house they lived in is condemned yet Willie still somehow occupies it. She lives off rotting, abandoned food, sustaining herself emotionally with the memories of her sister she embellishes as a way to protect herself from her brutal reality.
Director Megan Sampson very competently captures the claustrophobic atmosphere of the worlds these characters inhabit. The small, intimate space of the Old Fitz downstairs theatre is perfect for the scenes of suffocating domesticity; we feel we are sitting in the living room with these damaged characters, straining to be free, to breathe fresh air. Set and costume designer, Meg Anderson uses simple props and costumes to evoke a 1930s Southern milieu. All three actors show admirable versatility in playing multiple roles, even attempting, though not always successfully, the difficult tonal shifts in the Southern dialects the characters speak in.
Three (short) Plays is running until August 15 at the Old Fitz Theatre, Woolloomooloo.
To book tickets to Three (Short) Plays by Tennessee Williams, please visit https://www.oldfitztheatre.com.au/three-plays-by-tennessee-williams.
Photographer: Robert Miniter
