 |
| Cara Duff-MacCormick, Michael York. |
 |
| Michael York. |
One of a string of depressing failures that issued in his
declining years from the pen of the great American dramatist Tennessee
Williams. A revision of an earlier work played in London in 1967 and later in
Chicago under the title The Two Character
Play, it displayed a pair of actors, a sister named Clare (Cara Duff-MacCormick)
and her brother, Felice (Michael York), stranded by their theatre company in a
forbidding “unknown” state theatre somewhere in a chilly region. They have been
abandoned because of their alleged insanity. (The “theatre” may be a madhouse
and the “actors” inmates. They may also be two halves of a single personality.
Michael York later wrote in his memoir that Williams confirmed the roles to be “alter
egos, the masculine-feminine, positive-negative, active passive elements of one
character.”)
Illusion mingles with reality as they proceed to perform
their melodramatic, elusive “Two-Character Play,” about siblings living in the
South, for the audience presumed to be entering the venue. It is left purposely
vague whether this play about parental homicide and suicide, and the incestuous
children left behind, is indeed a play or whether it represents their own
confused, lonely existence in a hostile, hateful world. When the
play-within-the-play concludes, the helpless Clare and Felice are seen to be in
much the same estranged position vis-à-vis the world around them as the roles
they have just enacted.
Out Cry’s
humorless, abstruse, symbolic theme and “inchoate” treatment, as Douglas Watt
termed it, made it improbable Broadway fare and it closed quickly. There were,
however, some who thought it interesting, if in a limited way. Clive Barnes
said it was “deliberately static but also moving,” and considered the acting “remarkable,”
welcoming England’s Michael York in his New York debut. Others noted the
personal tone of the play and suggested it was a revelation of the playwright’s
own torment of recent years, and his painful experience when putting his work on
view for critical attack by the public and press. Mel Gussow noted the drama’s “indisputable
lyric beauty,” but decided that it never achieved the ostensibly interesting
purpose that inspired it. “There are not enough contradictions, ambiguities and
echoes. The playwright has not fully explored the challenging territory he has
chosen for himself.”
In his memoir, Traveling
Player, York describes being asked directly by the playwright to play
Felice, his own fascination in the play despite not fully understanding it, and
his belief that it was, indeed, based on Williams’s experience of “a time when,
overwhelmed with personal torment, he had retreated from the world in a kind of
panic and had actually been locked up in a St. Louis psychiatric hospital. He
quite literally had not known where he was.”
He describes the production process in detail, the
out-of-town tryouts in New Haven, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., where the
critical response was encouraging, and the constant revisions made by the
ever-present playwright. The production photos show York wearing a beard, but
this was eventually shaved off, and his long, occasionally face-obscuring hair
trimmed. He describes how, at the final run-through he “felt incandescent with
a strange energy, . . . and almost collapsing on stage,” only to discover “it
was a devilish attack of flu."
Although he soon recovered, he found the role extremely
tiring, as did his costar of her part. Shortly before the New York opening a
doctor diagnosed him as suffering from exhaustion. Then, the opening: “Houselights
down. Curtain up. In the wake of the spotlights I felt supercharged from nerves
and excitement. We began. Out of the
corner of my eye I noticed something flash from Cara’s eye: her contact lens! I
felt a frisson of pure panic—perfectly in keeping with the performance, thank
God—but she seemed composed, and, though half-blinded, managed beautifully.”
Later, after the closing, York found out that producer “David
Merrick had only agreed to mount this strange eclectic piece at Tennessee’s
insistence in order to obtain the performance rights to his more commercial Red Devil Battery Sign.” He notes that
Williams thought Out Cry “his most
important work. How long, I wondered, before that was publicly confirmed and
acknowledged?” A 2013 revival with Amanda Plummer and Brad Dourif at New World
Stages did little to convince me, at any rate, that such acknowledgment would
ever come.