One Arm
The Glass Menagerie. Now another important and compelling Williams work makes its debut here: director Moises Kaufman’s stage version of “One Arm” and Williams’s unproduced 1972 screenplay of the same title. A collaboration between Steppenwolf, About Face Theatre, and Kaufman’s Tectonic Theater Project, One Arm is still a work in progress. But in Kaufman’s sensitive adaptation, it’s far better than most of Williams’s later efforts. And as a showcase for a breathtaking lead performance by the brilliant and charismatic young Reynaldo Rosales, it’s not to be missed.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
One Arm is the offbeat tale of Ollie, a male prostitute prowling the sexual underworlds of New Orleans and New York in the years before Pearl Harbor. (In the original story, Ollie’s last name is Winemiller, which Williams later assigned to the heroine of his play Summer and Smoke–a prim minister’s daughter who becomes a whore.) Ollie is an ex-sailor and once-promising boxer who lost an arm not in battle but in a stupid drunk-driving accident. Embittered by having his athletic career cut short, the macho muscleman decides that all he has to offer is his powerful but imperfect body, which to some gay men exerts the allure of a “broken Apollo”–a disfigured classical sculpture come to life. Ollie retreats into emotional isolation to turn tricks, but his disgust and self-loathing eventually erupt in brutal violence that leads to his conviction for murder. Awaiting “the mechanical cruelty of the law” on death row, Ollie receives mail from thousands of his former customers–letters expressing affection, concern, and gratitude for their intense if brief encounters–and he becomes aware of the warmth he has brought to people’s lives, of the debts we owe each other, and of the unfinished business we all leave as we face death.
For Kaufman, the process of making theater is often as important as the results. The Laramie Project, his acclaimed examination of the murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard, is as much about his actors’ responses to the killing as about the crime itself. Similarly, One Arm is in part about the creation of a play from extant sources. The evening begins with a narrator reading from Williams’s introduction to his screenplay: “I have conceived of the film as a dark poem whose theme is the prevalence of mutilations among us all, and their possible transcendence.” The narrator, costumed as a 1940s radio announcer, goes on to deliver a running commentary compiled from the original story’s third-person prose and the screenplay’s directions (“exterior: close-up of Ollie,” “dissolve to boxing arena”), a sometimes gimmicky distancing device.
