‘Sweet Bird’ set to soar again in SA
“TIME is the longest distance between two places,” writes Tennessee Williams in the closing moments of The Glass Menagerie. He would know.
Each of his major characters valiantly battle with the enemy time. The effects and ravages of passing time would preoccupy Williams throughout his career, but in no other play does he examine this as deeply as in his haunting 1959 masterpiece Sweet Bird of Youth.
February was African-American History Month and March commemorates Williams’ 107th birthday as well as the 59th anniversary of the original Broadway production of Sweet Bird of Youth. It seems fitting to look back at some of the momentous historic events that shaped America, South Africa and one of Williams’ greatest and most enduring plays.
This March a major revival of Sweet Bird of Youth opens at the Artscape Theatre, 40 years since the play’s original South African premiere on the very same stage in 1978.
In the time and distance between these two productions and the original Broadway production 60 years ago, several major socio-political events occurred that directly influenced the writing and producing of this seminal play.
Set in the small town of Saint Cloud, on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, Sweet Bird of Youth tracks the fading dreams of hustler Chance Wayne, a long-gone traveller returning home. Alongside Chance, former movie star Alexandra Del Lago (travelling incognito as Princess Kosmonopolis) faces her own uncertain future. The play contains some of Williams’ most evocative lyrical passages and is regarded as one of his finest dramas.
Williams had always been a socially conscious writer, and Sweet Bird of Youth is his drama most directly linked to the civil rights movement that was unfolding in the US during the mid-20th century. Sweet Bird of Youth gave Williams a powerful vehicle to voice his disdain for the bigotry and legalised racial segregation and discrimination that dominated the American South. Prof Sharon Monteith notes: “Never a writer to steer clear of racial or sexual taboos, Williams was in the vanguard of playwrights exploring social issues that ran much deeper than their surface melodrama.”
The brutal lynching of 14-yearold Emmett Till in 1955 became one of the defining moments of the civil rights movement. Till, an African-American from Chicago, was lynched in Mississippi after a white woman claimed he had offended her.
The brutality of the murder, the acquittal of the murderers and the decision of Till’s mother to have an open-casket funeral sent shock waves around the world and mobilised the African-American community to take a stand after centuries of abuse and discrimination.
Williams delicately wove this tragic strand into the fibre of his play. In Sweet Bird of Youth, the racist patriarch and politician Boss Finley campaigns for “white women’s protection” while condoning the castration of a young black man for speaking to a white woman. The play’s hero, Chance Wayne, is doomed to a similar fate as Williams scholar John M Clum explains: “Chance is castrated, not killed, but in Williams’ world, in which sex is life, castration is death. His castration is ordered by Boss Finley, the ruthless politico who ‘can’t cut the mustard’.
“It will be enacted by his sexually profligate son and his friends. Boss Finley is campaigning for castration of blacks who commit miscegenation, and Chance is to have the black man punished for corrupting and polluting his too-beloved daughter. While castration links Chance to the racial other, and the term ‘criminal degenerate’ links him to the sexual other, impotence and castration seem to be the way of the world.”
Monteith concurs: “Southern demagogues used white ladies to symbolise a plantation myth, ‘the cult of true womanhood’, in which the four cardinal virtues of piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity were asserted. After 1953, when sociologist Alfred Kinsey claimed women frequently enjoyed sexual relationships outside of marriage, its propaganda increased.
“Boss Finley relies on his daughter Heavenly to embody the white ‘purity’ that segregationists sought to protect from corruption and race mixing, based in deleterious stereotypes of a newly permissive age and fear of racial change.”
Sweet Bird of Youth opened on Broadway in 1959, starring Paul Newman as Chance Wayne and Geraldine Page as the Princess. The play was a huge success, becoming Williams’ fourth longest-running play on Broadway after A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Glass Menagerie.
The play has been adapted for the screen twice, first in 1962 with Newman and Page recreating their Broadway roles, and again in 1989 in a made-for-television film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Mark Harmon.
Sweet Bird of Youth finally had its South African premiere in 1978. South Africa in the late 1970s in many ways resembled the American South in the 1950s. The Soweto riots of 1976 and the brutal murder of Steve Biko in 1977 had catapulted the dire situation in South Africa to international attention, and it was in this milieu that Sweet Bird of Youth was first presented in South Africa.
The theatre had always been an important platform for South Africans to speak out against the oppressive apartheid regime, especially in independent theatres like The Space Theatre in Cape Town and The Market Theatre in Johannesburg.
What makes the original South African production of Sweet Bird of Youth particularly notable is the fact that it was the first production where actors of colour appeared alongside white actors on a then segregated State Theatre stage.
The 1978 production, directed by Henry Goodman, starred Paul Slabolepszy as Chance Wayne and Vivienne Drummond as the Princess.
Much has changed for the better in both South Africa and America since Sweet Bird of Youth was first presented on Broadway and at the Artscape Theatre. A documentary on Barack Obama concluded with this summation: “Rosa Parks sat so that Martin Luther King could walk so that Obama could run so that our children can fly.”
The Artscape Theatre Centre itself has undergone a major transformation in the last 40 years. Today, under the dynamic leadership of Marlene le Roux, it is a vibrant, inclusive, world-class performing arts hub welcoming all the diverse people of our rainbow nation.
This 2018 production of Sweet Bird of Youth, directed by awardwinning Fred Abrahamse, is a testament to the ability of South African artists to make an impression on the international stage.
This production opened in the US last year and played to soldout houses and standing ovations. Named one of the “Best Theatre Productions in the Boston Area in 2017”, Sweet Bird of Youth was hailed by the American press as “exceptional theatre”, “a transformative experience” and “nothing short of brilliant”.
Cape Town theatre lovers have eight performances to see this unforgettable drama in its only local engagement on the very stage where the play premiered four decades ago.
Sweet Bird of Youth will be presented in the Artscape Theatre from March 31 until April 8. Evening performances are at 7pm with matinees at 3pm. Tickets prices range from R180-R200. Booking is now open at Computicket or Artscape-Dial-A-Seat.
Meyer is an actor, designer and founding member of Abrahamse & Meyer Productions