Rare Tennessee Williams play to open at Studio 101
“The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore,” a fascinating Tennessee Williams rarity, makes its Houston premiere this week as an Equity Showcase production — a labor of love for director Ron Jones, star Celeste Roberts and several other stage veterans, including actors Joel Sandel and David Grant.
An Equity Showcase means that a group of independent artists, rather than a theater company, produce the show. Often, it’s a work somewhat off the beaten track that the artists dearly want to work on. Such productions occur regularly in New York, but surprisingly, this is the first one for Houston.
Equally overdue is the first Houston stop for “Milk Train,” a play that flopped on Broadway,
not once but twice — in 1963, then in revised form a year later. Williams then adapted it into the 1968 film “Boom!,” which starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton — and also proved a notorious failure.
“People ask ‘Why are you doing a play that flopped on Broadway?’ Jones said with a knowing laugh that implied a truth known to many theater fans — that many works that “flopped” are well worth producing, just as many commercial hits have no artistic significance whatsoever.
“I’m of the opinion that anything by Tennessee Williams is worth doing,” Jones declared. “So what if this play was not a hit originally? That can mean the production wasn’t right or that it simply wasn’t understood the first time around. I know that subsequent productions, including the 2011 off-Broadway revival, have been very well received — which proves the play can be done well.”
In his five-decade career, Jones has directed Williams masterworks such as “A Streetcar Named Desire” as well as the Houston premieres of underrated gems “A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur” and “Vieux Carre.”
“Milk Train” proved a turning point for Williams. It ended the string of successes, from “The Glass Menagerie” to “Night of the Iguana,” that had established him as America’s greatest playwright. Act Two of his career would find him almost always in disfavor with critics, and produce no further com- mercial hits.
Yet “Milk Train” is undeniably important Williams, a deeply personal work with many of his characteristic strengths. Its larger-than-life protagonist is the rich, eccentric Flora Goforth, four times widowed and now dying. Spending her last days dictating her memoir in her mountaintop villa in Italy, Flora is visited by the young poet Christopher Flanders, nicknamed “the Angel of Death” for his practice of coming to call on rich old women “just a step ahead of the undertaker.” Is he opportunist or consoler? As Flora hurls herself into a last fling at flirtation, her edgy interplay with Chris, and others of her colorful circle, unleashes Williams’ complex musing on life, death, art, love and the “why?” of it all.
Williams wrote the play while Frank Merlo, his partner of 14 years, was dying of lung cancer, and he was facing demons of uncertainty about his own artistic powers. The title reflects the distressing sense of some life-sustaining force drying up and disappearing.
In his notes for the original production, Williams wrote that Flora represents “a universal condition of human beings: the apparently incomprehensible but surely somehow significant adventure of being alive that we must pass through for a time.”
Like a few other Williams works that were initially dismissed, “Milk Train” has undergone a reappraisal in recent years. Michael Wilson, a Williams specialist (and former Alley Theatre associate artistic director), helmed the 2011 New York revival, starring Olympia Dukakis, in a new edition that combined the best of Williams’ various rewrites.
“The play was dismissed too quickly,” Wilson said of the 1960s productions at the time of his revival. “It never had its chance to unfold. Tennessee was and remains a great storyteller who transports you out of ordinary existence and into an elevated sphere. He has so many intoxicating sensual details.”
Response to the 2011 revival was sufficiently favorable that the Daily Beast headlined its report: “Tennessee Williams’ forgotten masterpiece.”
Jones is using the same script as that revival — in his view, “an amalgam of the best elements” of Williams’ several revisions.
“I’ve always prized the way (Williams) uses language, the musicality of the lines,” he said. “In that respect, this will remind fans of his famous plays. That and its sheer theatricality. I believe theater should be larger than life, not just representation. He writes characters who are theatrical, over the top perhaps, but rich and interesting people, and situations that have a touch of fantasy. In fact, he called this play a fantasy.”
Williams also called it “a poem of death.”
One key factor “Milk Train” shares in common with the best-known Williams plays is its memorable heroine. Williams, of course, created some of the greatest heroines in American theater. Flora Goforth takes her place alongside Amanda Wingfield, Blanche du Bois, Alma Winemiller, Maggie the Cat, Princess Kosmonopolis and Hannah Jelkes.
As soon as Jones suggested the role to Roberts — well, as soon as she read the script — she was sold on the play.
“I was attracted to the role because it presents such a challenge,” she said. “She is just a complicated human being — but who isn’t? If you’re not careful, you’ll play one dominant note and come off just plain mean. But there is so much more to her — a lonely person confronting her past, while writing her memoirs and having to own up to her mistakes. She’s a tough survivor who is facing her own inevitable demise and, like everything else in her life, she is determined to beat it.”
“Milk Train” is Roberts’ first Equity Showcase. “It’s been fun to be involved in all facets, from casting to marketing,” she said. “David Grant, one of our Equity Members, took the lead helping produce it, and the whole thing has been a fun and collaborative effort. We hope this inspires other actors to produce their own Houston showcase for any piece that really speaks to them!”