Green Eyes

When I heard I could see a Tennessee Williams play in a hotel room with an audience of 14, I knew I had to go. It could be so exciting! Or, y'know...I could end up crammed into a row of large men behind a row of rather tall people in a sweltering, small hotel room in midtown, leaning back and forth to try to catch as much of the action between to mostly unclothed people in a 40-minute play that is rarely performed, possibly for a good reason.

I love Tennessee Williams. His plays are sultry and melodramatic, touching and funny and sad. And Green Eyes is like that. But it's also exceedingly slight and when performed in intimate confines, the melodrama starts to feel oppressively larger than life, like it might just force you right out of the room. Which would be a problem if there's literally nowehere for you to go, you can't stop sweating, and the claustrophobia sets in.

Listen, there were things I liked about this. The actors were gutsy and committed, and the incredibly small audience made the experience pleasantly communal. But what a weird show. After a bizarre opening song, which has no place in the play, a newly married couple fights about whether or not the wife cheated on the husband the very night that they were married. It's directed in such an affected way that I kept thinking it might stop at any moment and I'd have missed some sort of key revelation that was quietly seeded throughout. But hello, it's Tennessee Williams. There's nothing quiet about his plays. And my concerns were for naught because the truth comes out and all is revealed in a verbose and vaguely absurd monologue.

The two actors did an amazing job at the push and pull between the characters--bouncing from playful to sexual to violent, they portrayed the emotional and power shifts of two people who might be in love, might be at war, and might be both. But any time the emotions settled into place for long, they were pitched so high that I couldn't quite believe anything. Was it the directing? The writing? The fact that the actors were a foot in front of us? I'm not quite sure. But I do know that I had expected the performance to be uncomfortable. I just thought that discomfort would come from the intimacy of the space and the performance, not from the temperature on the thermostat. I'd have been missed if I missed this, and I'm glad I had the experience. But I didn't love anything about it. Ah well. Win some, lose some.