Ouch!? Darius DeHaas in Twelfth Night at Westport Country Playhouse. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

All I know is what they said in a press release issued late this afternoon:
Due to a serious injury to an actor, Westport Country Playhouse has canceled tonight’s performance (Friday, October 14th) of Twelfth Night, or What You Will. Patrons holding tickets are asked to please contact the Playhouse Box Office at 203-227-4177 to exchange tickets into another Twelfth Night performance, running through November 5. The Playhouse apologizes for any inconvenience and appreciates its audience’s continued support.

But Playbill.com suspects the injured party is Darius De Haas, who plays Feste in the Mark Lamos-directed production. Feste’s a wandering fool, ripe for potential injuries.
I’m seeing the show Sunday afternoon, to review it for the Fairfield County Weekly, so I’ll apprise you of any cast changes then.

Here’s the previously announced cast list:
MALVOLIO – David Adkins
SIR ANDREW AGUCHEEK – Jordan Coughtry
OLIVIA ATTENDANT – Nakeisha Daniel
FESTE – Darius de Haas
CAPTAIN/PRIEST – Rick Ford
MARIA – Donnetta Lavinia Grays
ORSINO – Lucas Hall
VIOLA – Mahira Kakkar
FABIAN/VALENTINE – Justin Kruger
ORSINO ATTENDANT/SAILOR – Myron Lee
OLIVIA ATTENDANT – Kimberly Maresca
ORSINO ATTENDANT/SAILOR – Chris Ryan
SEBASTIAN – Rachid Sabitri
SIR TOBY BELCH – David Schramm
ANTONIO – Paul Anthony Stewart
OLIVIA – Susan Kelechi Watson

Annalee Jefferies and Liv Rooth in the Westport Country Playhouse production of Suddenly Last Summer. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Suddenly Last Summer

By Tennessee Williams. Through Sept. 10 at Westport Country Playhouse. Directed by David Kennedy. Scenic design by Narelle Sissons. Costume design: Ilona Somogyi. Lighting design: Matthew Richards. Original music/Sound design: Fitz Patton. Performed by Liv Rooth (Catharine Holly), Annalee Jefferies (Mrs. Venable), Lee Aaron Rosen (Dr. Cukrowicz), Charlotte Maier (Mrs. Holly), Ryan Garbayo (George Holly), Tina Stafford (Sister Felicity), Susan Bennett (Miss Foxhill).

What must it have been like to have seen the world premiere of Suddenly Last Summer in 1958? In winter? When it was half of a double bill with the collective title Garden District? (Its companion piece was Something Unspoken.) Before it was expanded (with the help of Gore Vidal) into a feature film? Before its title gained the comma after the “Suddenly”?

Suddenly Last Summer has become a play without an awful lot of baggage, some of it necessary in order to buttress a play that’s essentially a build-up to an extraordinary monologue.

At this point in his career, Tennessee Williams had turned out numerous equally fine, and similiarly structured, monologues, and would go on to write many more. What gives the fragile Suddenly Last Summer the cachet it has, next to the playwright’s long list of equally strong Southern-frenzy family psychodramas?

Well, it’s that ending, of course. An image so horrific that the characters onstage don’t want to consider it, but which somehow the audience accepts. Williams always knew just how far he could push a dirty little secret, how far he could pull in an audience without grossing them out.

Is there a literary term for a metaphor which is much more disturbing than the thing it is metaphorizing? Suddenly Last Summer is a simple, direct drama about a society which is unable to let itself accept certain things, a society which will race toward death and destruction before it will pause to accept certain differences in class, in character, in style, in preferences. In taste. If you don’t get the undercurrent of the seaside plot, there’s an onstage icon to concentrate on: a ten-foot Venus Flytrap plant, starving for sustenance.

The even toothier anecdotal image which climaxes the drama  after the grandest build-up allowed onstage short of a three-ring circus. The entire play is a lead-in to the massive cathartic confessional monologue by Catharine Holly, a woman who must speak truth to power. She knows how her cousin Sebastian Venable—noted poet with an interest in, ahem, sea turtles—met his untimely death. Sebastian’s mother doesn’t want to hear Catharine’s scandalous, and possibly preposterous, ravings. Unless a lid can be clamped on Catharine, Mrs. Venable’s threatening to hold up the money which Sebastian willed to Catharine (and to her mother and brother, also present in the play, to simper and beg while Catharine tries to hold her ground and her sanity).

The human element is wonderfully manic. People blurt out things, then get cagey. They rant, then shut up politely so that others might rant too. They’re controlling, then strangely permissive. This seems natural after a while. What’s unarguably contrived, especially half a century after the play was written, is the medical certainty guiding the choice about what to do with Catharine. If she is given a lobotomy, nobody will ever believe her story. If she is given a certain truth serum, people undoubtedly will.

The Greeks had their theatrical devices too, and Suddenly Last Summer is no less tragic for having to stoop to that old “truth serum” gambit. Such surety about miracle cures and human behavior gives the already shadowy and sultry Suddenly Last Summer the air of film noir. Director David Kennedy and his designers take this realization and run with it. Costume designer Ilona Somogyi dresses the men in blindingly white suits to contrast with the darkness of Matthew Richards’ lighting. Set designer Narelle Sissons confines the players within a not exactly naturalism yet not exactly expressionistic boxy stage area. It’s sound designer Fitz Patton (whose work as a Yale School of Drama student a decade ago I still vividly recall—he did a similarly haunting design for a production of Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker) who gets to play the nature card, and who gets to most fully evoke the windswept beach which is the key location of Catharine’s story.

Some difficult choices have to be made here: how much should the designers choose to illustrate Catharine’s tale? How much should they underscore her emotional unrest with swelling music and erratic lighting? How still, or how out of control, should Catharine be when telling her story? How should her audience—the blistering Mrs. Venable, her secretary, Catharine’s dopey brother and weepy mom, a nurse and an earnest young doctor—behave when hearing it?

When Suddenly Last Summer became a movie, the filmmakers simply brought Catharine’s tale to life. The theatrical vision is far different. Kennedy and the rest of the creative team do a tricky balancing job between giving this show the tight, painterly composition it asks for and letting it breathe like it should.

Annalee Jefferies, one of Connecticut’s best-known Tennessee Williams interpreters thanks to her leading roles in several installments of the decade-long Williams “marathon” at Hartford Stage, nails the insufferability and vindictive vulnerability of Mrs. Venable, a character who seems to miss her long-gone youth more than she does her dead son. Jefferies, who’s only 57 years old herself, makes Mrs. Venable look and seem ghoulishly old and crusty. It’s impossible to think that this same actress was being Blanche Dubois just 13 years go, not to mention the frilly heroine of Theresa Rebeck’s comedy Bad Dates at Hartford Stage much more recently. How did this vibrant, rosy-faced actress learn to sit still in a wheelchair and connive so convincingly?

In the crucial role of Catharine, Liv Rooth lives up to the immense introduction she’s afforded from all those folks worrying about what she might say or do. She’s like one of the figurines in The Glass Menagerie: beautiful but close to cracking, and about to be stored away for her own good.

The supporting cast, to their credit, grandstands when necessary and fades into the background otherwise. I found myself wondering, if Tennessee Williams were writing today, whether he’d go to the unnecessary expense of trotting on Catharine’s family members—until I realized that they are much-needed comic relief. Charlotte Maier and Ryan Garbayo gamely inject the jokes, before Catharine gets injected with a needle. As a caretaking nun (Tina Stafford, who could give those dictatorial Late Nite Catechism nuns a run for their rosaries) and the secretary are critical characters as well, as representative of the order of things and higher powers as is that galumphing Venus Flytrap in the corner.

Liv Rooth as Catharine Holly, backed by Charlotte Maier as her mother and Ryan Garayo as her brother, in Suddenly Last Summer at Westport Country Playhouse. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Suddenly Last Summer is not an ensemble piece. It’s a series of solo turns with a virtuoso piece at the end.

Again, I can’t imagine what it must have been like to have seen Suddenly Last Summer as part of a bill, whether with Something Unspoken or anything else. But seeing it in this composed, modernistic, technically pristine yet lived-in production, I see how flexible and wondrous a script it is. It may be hard to swallow, but it goes down easy.

How quaint, to follow a calendar-year season schedule rather than the school-year model preferred by most regional theaters. But Westport’s legacy is as a summer theater, so making that season the center makes perfect sense.

When some theaters list a lot of familiar classics, it’s fair to chide them for playing it safe—as long as those theaters have some legacy of new works or other risk-tasking that they’re forsaking. Westport’s history is as a cool summer stock house known for attracting big movie and theater stars to do regional renditions of the popular dramas and comedies of their time. You marvel at the old posters on display in the lobby not because the shows are so exotic but because the casts are. Who wouldn’t have wanted to see Lilian Gish in The Trip to Bountiful in 1953? Or Thornton Wilder appearing in his own Our Town and Sking of Our Teeth? Imogene Coca in Anita Loos’ Happy Birthday, offering what would have to have been a very different take on a role originated by Helen Hayes? Art Carney, who originated the role of Felix Ungar in the Odd Couple, instead starring in a different Neil Simon comedy, Prisoner of Second Avenue? Jack Gilford and Lou Jacobi in Simon’s The Sunshine Boys?

So that’s the attitude I take to Westport: shows you’ve heard of, but with an added ingredient that makes them seem fresh. Sometimes that ingredient is just the theater itself, neatly renovated a few years ago in a manner which added comfort and high-tech accoutrements while respecting the classic dimentions of the stage (very high, rather deep) and the auditorium (dark and wooden, the seats built into meeting-house pews). The WCP audience is unlike any in the state: eager to indulge in a night out at the theater, but more worried about wasting their precious time than their money. They don’t suffer bad plays gladly. Mark Lamos understands this crowd as few ever have, and handles the role of artistic director rather differently than he did his last big Connecticut regional theater gig, running Hartford Stage for 17 years (from the late ‘70s into the early ‘90s). The WCP, after all, is a place where Shakespeare has rarely been done. (And we have yet to see how next month 2011-season-concluding Twelfth Night goes.)

So, the season:
May 1-19, 2012: The previously announced 25th anniversary revival of Sondheim & Lapine’s Into the Woods, directed by Lamos. It’s a co-production with Baltimore CenterStage.
June 12-30, 2012: The Year of Magical Thinking. Joan Didion adapted her own bestselling memoir (about her state of mind following the the deaths of her husband John Gregory Dunne and their daughter Quintana Roo Donne) for the stage. The New York production was directed by playwright David Hare, who had one of his own plays at Westport last year. The Westport production of The Year of Magical Thinking stars Maureen Anderman, who took over for Vanessa Redgrave in the New York run. Anderman has a long list of Broadway and TV credits, but I would rather note that she is equally acclaimed in the regional theater, especially in Connecticut, where she has starred at Long Wharf, Yale Rep and Hartford Stage. She certainly has the gravitas to do Didion—Anderman’s resume runs from O’Neill to Pinter to soap operas. But any one-woman play about mortality, be it Wit or Year of Magical Thinking or God Said Ha!, needs to balance the darkness with lightness—so take comfort in the fact that Anderman’s killed in comedies from the likes of Moliere, Kaufman and Gurney. I fondly recall her First Lady at Yale Rep. She’s got the range to do whatever she wants.

Maureen Anderman,thinking.

John Ellison Conlee, Maggie Lacey, Jenn Gambatese and Chris Henry Coffey in Mark Lamos' production of Terrence McNally's Lips Together, Teeth Apart at Westport Country Playhouse through July 30. Photo by T. Charles Erickson

Lips Together Teeth Apart opened last night at Westport Country Playhouse. The 1991 Terrence McNally vacationing-couples tragicomedy continues its Fire Island fireworks through July 30.

I’ll be reviewing the production for the Fairfield County Weekly; that review will be out Wednesday. Rather than risk repeating myself here, you can tide yourself over for a few days with some factoids about the play.

1. The original production happened at Manhattan Theatre Club 20 years ago almost to the month, opening in June of 1991. It was directed by John Tillinger, who was at that time still regularly directing at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre.

2. The original New York cast included Christine Baranski, Swoosie Kurtz, Nathan Lane and Anthony Heald. Lane, who played the decidedly heterosexual Sam Truman in the show (the third of his seven appearances in Terrence McNally projects) , wasn’t yet open about his own sexuality, and didn’t in fact come out publicly for another decade.

3. In his program notes for the Westport production, Mark Lamos (director of the play as well as artistic director of the Westport Country Playhouse) says he had hoped to do Lips Together as part of his debut WCP season but was denied the rights due to an imminent Broadway revival.

4. Joe Mantello was set to direct that Broadway revival of Lips Together, Teeth Apart in 2010. There was feuding among the all-star cast: According to various gossip sites, Megan Mullaly thought that Patton Oswalt didn’t have the necessary stage experience, and she left the production after attempting unsuccessfully to have him ousted.

5. Mantello coincidentally directed another iconic gay-AIDS themed play this year, the award-laden revival of Larry Kramer’s 1985 drama The Normal Heart.

6. The play’s title comes from a method to counteract the tendency to clench or grind one’s teeth while sleeping. One dental product designed to help combat this “bad neuromuscular habit” is here.