Theatre Review: Tennessee Williams' Milk Train

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 08 March 2011 22:43

Written by Lucy Komisar

The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
Written by Tennessee Williams
Directed by Michael Wilson
Sets by Jeff Cowie, Lighting by Rui Rita
Starring Olympia Dukakis, Maggie Lacey, Darren Pettie, Edward Hibbert, Elisa Bocanegra, Curtis Billings

The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore is Williams’ turgid Southern Gothic view of death

There’s a touch of the Southern Gothic in many of Tennessee Williams’ plays, and it is usually seasoning in a pungent stew about human relationships, desires, and failings. But The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore is overwhelmed by Southern Gothic until it becomes a potboiler, a parody of a melodrama. There are frequent sounds of sea gulls and a lot of turgid prose. Director Michael Wilson’s over-the-top staging seems to tell us it’s camp and not to take it seriously.

Flora Goforth (Olympia Dukakis), whom Williams burdens with a Dickensian name, was a showgirl whose first husband made her a millionaire. She proceeded to marry three others, but loved only the last, a young poet who, driving the red sports car she gave him, crashed and died on the Corniche from Monte Carlo.

Now in her sixties, still with her American southern accent, she lives near Naples in a villa atop a cliff on the Amalfi coast overlooking the sea. It’s 1962. She is dictating her memoirs, mostly about her lovers and social life among the international set, to Frances “Blackie” Black (Maggie Lacey), a rather prim and conventional young woman (from a good women’s college) whose husband recently died.  

Flora spends a lot of time in a nightdress lolling on a round bed under a skylight, frequently buzzing to summon Blackie to take notes. She is a woman who expects people to jump to her orders. She refuses to face up to her own mortality, though she takes morphine for her “neuralgia.” In fact, she is a paean to life, glorying in her past.

She is visited by a gay friend (Edward Hibbert), known as the Witch of Capri, a fey blonde fellow who seems overdressed for the island. However, he fits into the weird mood, although I could not figure out why he could not pronounce Capri (accent on the first syllable), while Flora could. The full costumed kabuki dance she puts on for him is a show stopper.

Into that somewhat bizarre scene comes a strange man, Christopher Flanders (Darren Pettie), age 39, who makes mobiles and supports himself by attaching himself to rich elderly ladies. (The kindness of strangers?) Given their ages and conditions, the women all die, which has given him the name “angel of death.” Yes, this play is unsubtly about death.

Chris has climbed up a goat path and breached a fence to trespass on the grounds. Flora directs him to a cottage, and you wonder what each has in store for the other.

She is challenged by Chris. Attempting to maintain control, she refuses to let him eat. She declares, “I give away nothing, I sell and I buy.” In fact, they both want to use each other. He will wait her out.

This production is saved by the extraordinary performance of Olympia Dukakis, whose portrayal of the garish, bullying, self-centered Flora Goforth takes fire and pulls you in until you feel part of the conflagration.

Pettie as Chris and Lacey as Blackie do their best to bring their characters to life, though they seem uncomfortable in the setting, which gets more surreal as the play goes on. Hibbert simpers too much.

This play was finished in 1963, the year Williams’ long-time lover died. It is almost a satire of the writer’s best works of the 1940s and 1950s, and has only historical interest.

The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
Roundabout Theatre Company
at Laura Pels Theatre
111 West 46th Street
New York City
(212) 719-1300
Opened January 30, 2011; closes April 10, 2011.

www.roundabouttheatre.org

For more by Lucy Komisar: http://thekomisarscoop.com.

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