Christopher Ash Photo
Mickey Theis is reviving a Tennessee Williams play most people have never heard of — and he had a heck of a time remembering the lines.
That’s because many of his lines are partial lines, fragments of sentences. Which makes acting in the play a challenge. But also, perhaps, even more of a rewarding treasure to dust off and restore.
Theis is an actor starring in a revival of In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel at Yale Summer Cabaret. The play opens on Friday night and runs through Aug. 3.
Chris Bannow, one of the actors, said the theme of the summer’s offerings at the cabaret has been to present lesser-known works by giants of the theater. In Tennessee Williams’s 1969 four-hander, he picked a doozie.
Allan Appel Photo
Theis does not wear the Stanley Kowalski shirt in this play.
Reviewers at the time called the terminal marital battle between Miriam and Mark, her artist husband, played by Theis (pictured), impenetrable, and that was charitable.
An example of the dialogue between the two:
Mark: After a quick cold shower, I.
Miriam: You don’t hear what I say. It’s useless talking to you.
Mark: The loss of balance comes from the.
Miriam: I said that she said that.
The boozy, non-sequitur-ish sentences were characterized at the time not as Williams’ theater poetry but the uncontrolled verbal eruptions of a guy doing too many Cuba Libres and pills every night. It was evidence that his career was over, or, as Williams characterized it in his memoirs, that he was “falling.”
The young Yale School of Drama students mounting this play acknowledge the difficulties of maintaining coherence and momentum with the fragmented dialogue but emphasize the insights and the beauties of the short play. The play runs only about 45 pages. It seems likely to be a portrait of his friend Jackson Pollock’s marriage to painter Lee Krasner.
In an interview on Wednesday before the dress rehearsal and the beginning of the run, Bannow said he’d never seen the play performed elsewhere. Nor had he read the play before including it in the season. “What interests me about the play is what the play contains, not what others say” about it, he said. “It’s rare in our profession that we do a play we’ve never seen or heard about, and by a giant among playwrights.”
He intentionally didn’t research previous productions or damning reviews because “I didn’t want to rob myself of the experience of experiencing it,” he said.
Theis acknowledges that for an actor the play is difficult — he has many half sentences with full stop periods indicated by Williams. That makes continuity and keeping up momentum challenging for him and CelesteArias, who plays Miriam. But he believes Williams is after big game through this verbal technique.
Bringing the Bard to Tennessee
“I think he’s extremely lucid in a lot of this play, even if he was drinking. I don’t think he ever lost the ability to form beautiful sentences and to express poetry,” said Theis.
He went a step further, likening this play to one that reveals its secrets if you bring to it techniques he’s learned in studying Shakespeare as an actor.
“In Williams it’s the cadences [not the iambic pentameter in Shakespeare], figuring out the important information in what you’re saying,” said Theis.
Actor and director in the “green room” with the cabaret’s Associate Managing Director Anh Le.
“In the nouns lie the argument,” chimed in Bannow, who is also an actor. By that he meant he urges the actors to listen and telegraph the current of meaning, not matter if fragmented or abstruse, through the nouns, not the verbs or the adjectival stream that might precede.
Theis said that he often feels that Miriam is on a different track in the play from his own. His director reminded him that as husband and wife argue, she wanting a marriage and he being more devoted to art than anything else, “what she sees as psychosis, Mark sees as the discovery of color.”
The key line meaning-wise in the play, according to Bannow, is therefore Miriam’s: “Are we separate or are we two sides of the same coin?”
Bannow said that for him, a third-year directing student, poised to go into the alleged real world of work, the play’s issues speak directly to a question he asks himself: “We have to decide if this is a profession, or a vocation.”
“I have to be on Mark’s side. That’s the great part of being an actor. You have to fight for your character,” said Theis.
The other roles in the play are the bartender, played by Mitchell Winter, and Leonard, who is Mark’s art dealer; he’s played by Mamoudou Athie.