Orpheus Descending

Continuing my seemingly never-ending series on the works of Tennessee Williams, I turn to a play from 1957, Orpheus Descending, which was essentially a rewrite of play from 1940, Battle of Angels. The latter closed in Boston after a disastrous opening that included an abundance of smoke from an attempt at a stage fire--it drove many from the audience, those who hadn't left because they were offended on a moral basis.

Williams couldn't shake the play, and rewrote it, though it had only modest success. I saw it in a revival in 1989 starring Vanessa Redgrave. It has a great deal of emotional power, as almost all Williams' plays do, and revisits many of his themes, most especially examining the broken people who live in a uncompromising southern America.

I read both plays over the weekend, and the common thing about them is that they are set in a dry goods store in a small Mississippi town. The store is owned by a mean old cuss, Jabe, who is dying. His wife, who is at her wit's end, struggles to deal with her conflicting emotions, as she essentially hates him. She was thrown over by her beau and ended up with Jabe instead, who lives in the upstairs family quarters and knocks on the floor when he needs. This is described as sounding like death itself knocking.

Into town comes Valentine Xavier, a drifter wearing a snakeskin jacket. He is sexual by nature, without even trying. In Orpheus he plays a guitar signed by all the great musicians he's met, like Leadbelly, Jelly Roll Morton, and Woody Guthrie. He takes a job at the store, and he and the owner's wife form a relationship. Eventually, though, he is beset by the small minds of the town and made a martyr to his ways.

In Battle of Angels, Val is a man who is wrongly wanted for rape, a distinction that is removed in the rewrite. Also, he is given Christ-like imagery, as an old religious woman who has visions has painted his face onto the savior's in her rendition of the Last Supper. This is also excised from Orpheus Descending.

The most important change comes in the form of the lead female character. In Battle of Angels she is called Myra, and is somewhat shrewish. Val calls her rudest woman he's ever met. In Orpheus, she is known as Lady, and is the daughter of an Italian immigrant. She is much more robustly written, almost overly so, as if Blanche Dubois were on speed. This time, Val calls her the nicest woman he's ever met.

By making Lady Italian Williams upped the stakes, making her and Val outsiders. A backstory involving Jabe being responsible for killing her father--he was a bootlegger who made the mistake of selling liquor to Negroes--makes her life in the store even more miserable (she does not know this until the end).

There is an additional outsider, the character of Carole Cutrere (Cassandra Whiteside in Battle). She is part of the town's richest family, but is wayward, sleeping with men and behaving outrageously. She would probably be diagnosed as bipolar today, but in the time and place Williams writes of, she is cast out. She vies for Val's affections, but he spurns her, not appreciating being seen only as a hunk of meat.

Carole, though, has what is perhaps the best line of the play, near the closing, when she barters for Val's snakeskin jacket: "Wild things leave skins behind them, they leave clean skins and teeth and white bones behind them, and these are tokens passed from one to another, so that the fugitive kind can always follow their kind..."

The Fugitive Kind was the title of the film version, directed by Sidney Lumet, that I have not seen. I'll try to catch up with it in the coming days.