SOMETHING CLOUDY, SOMETHING CLEAR, 27 WAGONS FULL OF COTTON, and A TRIPLE SHOT OF WILLIAMS, Bailiwick Repertory. When a Tennessee Williams play isn’t done often, there’s a reason. Bailiwick’s three-show Williams festival stands as unfortunate proof of that. But one production suggests that these plays might just be waiting for the right interpreter.
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It’s 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, produced in conjunction with the Foreground Theater Company. This one-act begins creakily, as Jake sets fire to a neighboring plantation and bullies his wife, Flora, into covering for him. But once neighbor Silva arrives, Williams reveals what’s really going on and the piece develops almost unbearable intensity. Director Allen Jeffrey Rein saw right into the play’s heart and cast a Silva (Fred Warner) who has it–that amalgam of threat and sexuality required to portray Williams’s men–and a Flora (Jill Henderlight) who makes the wife’s victimization tragic instead of stupid. Frank Fowle undercuts Jake by playing him dumb: Jake gets his comeuppance because he’s clever, just not as clever as he thinks.
The set for the festival includes platforms too high for the actors to negotiate comfortably, and every time they plunge off them in Something Cloudy we notice the bedsheet that’s supposed to pass for sand. The giant picture frame surrounding August’s work space is a poor imitation of the one in The Glass Menagerie–and that’s the story of the entire festival.
