Last week, I went to Burton Taylor Studio to see Fox and Hound Theatre’s A Trio of Tennessee Williams, which collected three of his lesser-known and even less-performed works, for an intriguing evening that gained power as it went along. The trio of works in question are Ivan’s Widow, Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen, and 27 Wagons Full of Cotton. The first two works, roughly 25 minutes each, are performed back to back, while the final, slightly longer play is performed after a brief intermission.
The first piece, Ivan’s Widow is a two-hander between a predatory and controlling psychiatrist (a fittingly clinical Massimiliano Acerbi) and a young widow (Hannah Fox) who refuses to accept that her late husband is dead. There’s a deliberate ambiguity and unease as the characters dance around one another. The widow frequently contradicts herself and it’s unclear how much this is because of the psychiatrist’s gaslighting. Also left up to interpretation is to what extent the psychiatrist believes he is genuinely trying to help - at times his desire to awaken the widow from her delusion seems more concerned than self-serving.
The noirish disorientation was sometimes mysterious and other times just incoherent.
The play, written in 1981, was one of William’s final works and remained a rough draft at the time of his death. This was apparent in the disjointed storytelling and frequently repetitive action and dialogue. While the work starts off strong and the actors deliver emotionally, the script does not sharpen its fascinating themes into focus, and the dramatic ending is abrupt and unconvincing. The set design uses three identical doors on frames - only one of which opens - to underpin the Widow’s confusion - an inventive flourish in theory, but the writing is too convoluted to handle further flourishes and this ends up only adding to the bewilderment.
In contrast, the second piece, Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen, felt far more tonally cohesive. The long, lyrical monologues in the piece and the little narrative made the piece feel more like a poem than a play, centring on a husband and wife in the Great Depression. The husband (Codge Crawford) is trapped in an endless loop of alcoholism, waking up in strange places following benders and spending his unemployment checks, while his wife (Fox) sits at home, not eating or drinking but escaping into extended daydreams of a better life, one of which she details in an enthralling very long monologue. A deep yet still portrait of hopelessness, the futility here comes not only from the characters’ grim circumstances but more from their resignation about ever escaping them. Crawford and Fox’s southern accents are pitch-perfect (impressive from two Scottish performers). The set design is also brilliant here, with the settee from the previous play transformed into a meagre bed, and the bars of the window resemble those of a prison.
The final piece, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, was also the most propulsive and narratively complete of the three. Set at the sweltering height of a summer during the interwar period in the very rural US South, the play artfully lays out three vivid characters, the amoral and bullish Jake (Crawford), who may have just burnt down a rival cotton gin, his playful, infantilised wife Flora (Fox), whom he abuses, and the calmly cruel Silva (Acerbi), the owner of the rival gin. Strongly suspicious of Jake’s role in the arson, Silva nevertheless comes to him with his 27 wagons of cotton but expects something extra in return for the business. The play is a brief masterwork in learned helplessness and normalised abuse, as Jake’s interactions with Flora turn on a dime between adoring and denigrating. Flora is shown to be deeply resilient but entirely without resources, and the play feels claustrophobically tense as it hurtles towards its disturbing conclusion. The language is loaded as a gun and Fox shines here, painting Flora in a multitude of colours.
Taken together, and with the support of Ellie Jay Stevens’ emotionally intelligent directing throughout, the pieces make for a compelling, impressionistic look at control and entrapment that lingers long after the actors leave the stage.