Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Theater The End of Tennessee Williams: In Masks Outrageous and Austere
Posted by Dan Callahan on Tue, May 15, 2012 at 1:55 PM
Knight played Clarissa “Babe” Foxworth, one of the richest women in the world. Lost in a push-and-pull daze between alcohol and Ritalin, Babe has been abducted by a group of sharply dressed men known only as the Gideons (as in the Bible), but she seems more concerned with her younger husband Billy (Robert Beitzel) and his younger lover Jerry (Sam Underwood). Babe is obviously kin to Flora Goforth in Williams’s play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, in her riches, in her drug addiction, and in her temper, and she must also stand in for the playwright himself at the time he was writing this play, at sea in his own drug dependency and surrounded by hustlers of one sort or another. Billy says that Babe is a sacred monster, but there’s nothing all that sacred about her except when she details, in the play’s strongest speeches, her unrepentant and unappeasable desire for sex and sensuality, a theme also expressed in nightmarish form by the mute character of Playboy (Connor Buckley), who lets lighthouse keepers gangbang him for gum drops.
The extravagantly mannered Knight swaggered around the stage like the old-time Method actress she is. Her Babe snorted, stumbled, growled, demanded, shot off a gun when necessary, angrily flashed her eyes at her subordinates and peered imperiously through a lorgnette after she petulantly broke her own glasses. All of these furious attitudes had a ghastly kind of intensity that held the attention, but they only pointed up the fact that Babe is a self-absorbed whirlwind of selfishness without even an ounce of genuine curiosity about the people surrounding her. If we had felt that Babe had some of the talent and sensitivity of Williams, it would have been easier to endure her constant tantrums, but she is presented as just a vastly rich woman of no particular distinction. The heart and true poetry of Williams at his best were missing here, replaced by drugged self-congratulation, well-turned phrases and paranoia.
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