TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ SELDOM SEEN PLAY
SHOWS WHY IT’S SO SELDOM SEEN
It can be a curse to start one’s literary or dramatic career with a masterpiece. Doing so serves to intensify the expectations of one’s readership or audience while inflating the artist’s creative anxieties. Towards the end of his life, author of the classic antiwar novel Catch-22, Joseph Heller was being interviewed, when the reporter was churlish enough to offer his unsolicited opinion that with all his later efforts, that Heller had never succeeded in writing anything as good as Catch-22, Heller quipped back, “Who has?”
Opening his career with The Glass Menagerie (1944), soon to be followed by A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Tennessee Williams managed to fan the creative fire well enough to continue through the fifties, but that fire began to sputter out during the sixties and seventies, and was all but extinguished by 1983, when he died, heavily inebriated by secobarbital, by choking on a plastic cap of the type used on bottles of eye solution.
Remington Hoffman
Williams saw himself being overtaken by the “Young Turks” on Broadway such as David Mamet and Sam Shepard. Williams felt his plays had not evolved with the times, nor his theatrical language, and he was right. But worse, Williams said he was “warming his creative ink in the fire of old demons.” All playwrights seek their inspiration from that internal source of personal pain and long-hidden trauma. Akin to Mary Shelley’s “Modern Prometheus” from her gothic horror tale Frankenstein, they too are constructing a creature they hope can be infused with life. But unlike Victor Frankenstein, their creations are meant for the stage, constructed not from body parts exhumed from the graves of the recent dead but from scars found in that graveyard of the dramatist’s own past.
Susan Priver, Remington Hoffman
This is why most playwrights, despite how many plays they compose over their lifetimes, essentially only write a single story over and over again. With Shakespeare, it is the tale of a child’s struggle to achieve deliverance from the domain of the father figure. When the offspring succeed (The Tempest, Henry V, Midsummer Night’s Dream) the play closes with pageants, feasts, and spirits spiraling in the night. When they don’t (Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Julius Caesar) then we have a stage strew with blood and bodies.
Paul Coates
Williams, like Shakespeare, essentially had a core story of familial drama, if perhaps of a more truncated nature. Shakespeare was capable of overlaying his patriarchal conflict across battlefields ranging from the historical to the metaphysical. Williams’ matriarchal clashes remained confined to the cheap domiciles of the Big Easy and dodgy dives.
That said, let it be known that designer Joel Daavid’s extraordinarily detailed set for In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel at the Hudson Backstage Theatre is anything but dodgy as it succeeds with stunning effect in layering an interior of Shoji-like panels, the traditional sliding doors of Japan, into an intricate Art Deco patchwork. Daavid has repeatedly proven himself one of the foremost set designers working in LA theatre and I doubt I’ll see better work on any same-sized stage this year.
Paul Coates, Susan Priver
But the problem with this production is not with the set. Nor, under Jack Heller‘s direction, can the other designers involved be singled out for blame. These are known quantities that in the past have surmounted the artistic summits that have challenged them.
Well, this time the mountain won.
The indomitable crevasse is the one Williams dug in his desperation.
Like the flailing of a drowning man, Williams is clawing at anything in hope of keeping his head above the waves, and it’s that all too apparent desperation that defeats his endeavor. Published in 1969, In the Bar of A Tokyo Hotel has a little of everything—something old, something new, something meta—but not enough glue.
Paul Coates, Rene Rivera
Williams uses the same stock characters and situations that were ubiquitous during this stage of his career: the wealthy, aged beauty in need of saving; the impotent masculine shell of a former savior; the action taking place within the inescapable confines of some curious arena; and the presence of death flirting just outside its boundaries. We’ve seen all of these or some combination in The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963), The Mutilated (1965), The Seven Descents of Myrtle (1968) and The Red Devil Battery Sign (1975), where Williams employs the same recipe but adds a generous helping of JFK screwball conspiracy theory and throws in a mariachi band for good measure but to no effect.
There are a few flashes of classic Williams, but blink and you’ll miss them. There are also moments of meta-writing, where the narrative intentionally acknowledges its own presence within the writing.
The central story focuses on the deteriorating relationship between Mark, a prominent artist (Rene Rivera), and his wife Miriam (Susan Priver) who were once each other’s salvation, but now are dedicated to the dueling damnation of the other. In speaking with Leonard (Paul Coates), her husband’s gallery dealer, Miriam rhapsodizes on the limitations of human love, which is equally applicable to the entrapment of an actor’s spotlight:
MIRIAM: There’s an edge, a limit to the circle of light. The circle is narrow. And protective. We have to stay inside. It’s our existence and our protection. The protection of our existence. It’s our home if we have one.
LEONARD: Not to be trusted always.
MIRIAM: You know and I know it’s dangerous not to stay in it.
Susan Priver, Remington Hoffman
The trouble is that there is little plan here, and a good deal of panic; William grabs onto everything and holds onto nothing.
The cast does little to offset this burden. The best performances come not from the two leads. Rivera, as the artist on the spiral down, has chosen to depict his descent into madness as one long giggle fit; and Priver, who was so memorable in Harold Pinter’s A Slight Ache and as Blanche in Streetcar, both at the Odyssey, seems unfocused and defused here. Coates, as the sympathetic friend of both artist and wife, manages to walk the narrow tightrope Williams has stretched across the narrative for him, and Remington Hoffman as the Japanese barman with limited English, achieves the most on stage with the least provided.
For generous audiences, the opportunity of experiencing this seldom-seen work is to be commended. Unfortunately, after sitting through the first half hour alone, I found myself wishing for a few cocktails from the bar.
photos by Doug Engalla
In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel
Hudson Backstage Theatre, 6359 Santa Monica Blvd. in Hollywood
90 minutes, no intermission
Thurs-Sat at 8; Sun at 3
ends on May 18, 2025
for tickets ($40) visit Onstage411
for more shows, visit Theatre in LA
