The stage brightens up twice for Tennessee Williams’ A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, first through Louise Guinand’s lighting design and then, again, with the appearance of Deborah Hay as vulnerable Dorothea. Dorothea is wide-eyed and comically light doing her toe-touching exercises, fanning her arm pits, and then doing a series of ridiculously complicated sit-ups. Hay also chews into Williams’ lines with vigour and musicality as well and when Dorothea is forced to realize that her life must be fine as it is and that “we must just go on,” she is a woman of shattering emotional impact. Dorothea is an innocent creature who, when she “crosses the line,” has her big moment and can recall “the earth was whirling beneath me.” Then she crashes.
Director Blair Williams and cast do evocatively well with Tennessee Williams’ text, with earthy no-nonsense words, with words withered by desperation, existence, fragility, and daydreaming hopes. The play is –take your pick- either a tad drawn out or people actually do drawl their lives away in this manner and ooze all over the furniture with southern ennui. In any case Kate Hennig as Bodey, the roommate is an assertive, solid presence, a forceful counterbalance to superficiality who, in English or German, is street-smart and doesn’t buy into the dismissive pretention of Dorothea’s friend Helena, played hatefully snooty and oblivious to suffering by Kaylee Harwood.
Helena tries to use Dorothea and is cruelly unsympathetic to Miss Gluck, played by Julain Molnar, who is constantly weeping and hysterical. She sees Dorothea as “an emotionally fragile person who might collapse” and still tries to con her. Helena reeks condensation for those who shop on Dorothea’s side of the tracks and, meanwhile, Bodey wants Dorothea to marry her brother Buddy of whom the latter says “he needs a girl to fart along with him.” Buddy’s attraction is that he has cut down to eight beers a day from a dozen. We smell the sweat, in this flat, of the lives that live there. As often with these lunch time short plays, one is offered a fine production of a rarely seen gem that enriches our experience of theatre’s history and art.