Sweet Bird of Youth
Playwright: Tennessee Williams. At: The Artistic Home, 3914 N. Clark . Phone: 866-811-4111; $28. Runs through: Nov. 28
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Playwright: Tennessee Williams. At: Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark . Phone: 773-338-2177; $30. Runs through: Dec. 19
For the next two months, Clark Street should be renamed "Honorary Tennessee Williams Way." That's because two Clark Street theater companies, The Artistic Home and Raven Theatre, are respectively doing great honor to the late gay American playwright with juicy productions of Williams' 1959 drama Sweet Bird of Youth and his 1955 Pulitzer Prize winner, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Both productions richly capture Williams' heightened poetical style filled with desperate Southern characters caught up in a hot house climate that drives everyone to emotional extremes. It's easy to get hot and bothered from all of the radiated heat because both productions are so intimate.
Catch Sweet Bird of Youth first, because it plays for a shorter time. ( It also comes with a celebrity gossip factor since Nicole Kidman has been announced to star in a Broadway revival next year. )
Sweet Bird of Youth focuses on two characters who are desperately trying to cling on the perceived remnants of their youth: the washed-up Hollywood actress Alexandra del Lago ( a very throaty and amusingly scattered Kathy Scambiatterra ) and the arrogantly ambitious pretty boy Chance Wayne ( Josh Odor, very lovely to look at from all angles ) .
Alexandra is dealing with the ramifications of disastrous big-screen comeback, while Chance has grand plans to use del Lago to further his own Hollywood ambitions and to lord it over his politically corrupt hometown of St. Cloud, Fla.
In the sleek and versatile white-on-white set design of Mike Mroch and with Adam Smith's evocative sound design, director Dale Calandra conjures up a very sudsy soap opera that is filled with passionate actors who revel in their characters' grand-standing and glaring hypocrisies. It may be all a bit much, especially with the threatened plot twist of castration. But Williams liked to push the extreme buttons ( remember those cannibals in Williams' Suddenly, Last Summer? ) , and it all makes Sweet Bird of Youth a cracking good time.
If you want Williams in a more earthbound mode, then Raven Theatre's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is also extremely enjoyable. The suggested gay conflict between the alcoholic former football star Brick and his late friend Skipper, also makes this an historically important LGBT drama.
Director Michael Menendian helms a solid production for Raven, with great work from Liz Fletcher's chatty Maggie the Cat, Jason Huysman's agonized Brick and Jon Steinhagen's commanding Big Daddy. ( True, Steinhagen is technically too young for the role, but he more than makes up for it in his devil-may-care performance. )
As the weather turns colder, my advice is to get some great theatrical Southern heat from these two Clark Street companies. Williams' way with words is always welcome, and in the case of these two productions, truly wonderful.
