Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

Sweet Bird of Youth is not one of Tennessee Williams' best plays, but it does contain those stabs of poetry and longing for connection that mark all of his work. Geraldine Page and Paul Newman ran with it for a year on Broadway in 1959, and they did a calamitous film version in 1962 that gutted the play of all its flights of fancy and turned it into an overheated melodrama. In the film, Page played the faded movie star Alexandra Del Lago in an exaggerated, high camp style that was enjoyable in its way, but missed all emotional connection to the piece's themes of failure and lost youth. Newman took his shirt off a lot, and that was about it. I assume they were much better on stage with the full text.

This revival of Sweet Bird at the estimable Terry Schreiber Studio runs close to three and a half hours, is handsomely designed (by Hal Tiné), and even has mood music, some recorded and some played (by Anthony Aibel). It's an altogether old-fashioned theatrical experience, and I mean that in the best way. The acting is superb all the way down the line, and the actors feel like a real ensemble. In Scene Two of Act Two, when practically the entire large cast is onstage, everyone has a clear, distinct reaction to what's going on, so that you barely know who to look at: wherever you look, there is detailed, subtle acting. Hats off to director Schreiber for carefully orchestrating such a symphonic whole. Schreiber really does treat Sweet Bird as a piece of music, and this works wonders with the lyrical passages, as well as the uglier undertones, in the text.

As Alexandra, Joanna Bayless gives a big, imperious, painful performance that sometimes seems just this side of hammy, but her slight over-emphasis suits this monstrous woman. Her work is at its best when she simply listens to her hustler Chance (Eric Watson Williams) tell his life story, and you see her starting to feel something for him. If her last encounter with Chance feels a bit campy, that's a fault of the text. Williams is a perfect Chance, sweet but bull-headed, fragile but intense, and he carries the demands of the huge part without once faltering. Attention must now be paid to three actors who take roles that might have seemed one-dimensional and make them complex, faceted creations. As Boss Finley, a political monster, David Donahoe stresses the oblivious humanity of the man even when he's doing the cruelest things (in the film, though Ed Begley won an Oscar as Boss Finley, the character was just a fire-breathing cartoon). As Aunt Nonnie, the Mildred Dunnock part, Margo Goodman is so physically perfect for the role, so picturesquely frail, that you can't take your eyes off her. In her scene with Chance, she makes a whole one-act play out of trying to help him, feeling desire for him, and being fed up with his illusions. Finally, we have Andrea Jackson's Miss Lucy, slinky in her red dress, a real romantic. Jackson takes a woman who has often been played as a good-hearted but dim floozy and makes her the heart of the play during the big scene in Act Two, where her silent reactions to what goes on are often mesmerizing. Furthermore, casting an African-American actress such as Jackson as Boss Finley's mistress adds another Strom Thurmond-like layer to the Boss' hypocrisy, and this works out very well. All in all, this Sweet Bird may be an exhausting experience, but it's quite worthwhile to see this Williams play so ambitiously mounted, beautifully directed and sensitively played.