'Milk Train'
By HOWARD TAUBMAN
On one level Tennessee Williams is writing with unexampled mastery in "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore." On another and higher level, which few contemporary playwrights dare to attempt, Mr. Williams's new play fails.
Mr. Williams's main character is so scrupulously and humorously observed, so painted to the life with all her vitality and crotchets and pain that one feels this portrait could be hung with the old masters.
Flora Goforth is a dying woman with a flamboyant past and a bruising tongue. She sits on a mountain top on the coast of Italy with her three villas wired for sound so that she will not lose an instant when the impulse seizes her to continue dictating her memoirs.
She is coarse and coy, wise and foolish, vulnerable and tyrannical. She is full of pretense, yet has reached the point of no more pretense. She recalls her first five husbands with a pungent, sardonic objectivity, and for a moment she almost croons over the recollection of Alex the sixth, last and only attractive one.
Hermione Baddeley plays this crude yet uncommon woman with dazzling variety. Her voice has more compass and nuance than the subtlest of singers. She can be droll in the clownish way Mr. Williams means her to be, and she can be as lazily forthright as the sun that beats down on the Italian sea.
Preparing for dinner an interrupting her dressing with bursts of dictation into one of the ubiquitous mikes, she puts on a Kabuki gown and a black wig with delightfully raffish humor. Her recollection that one of her husbands bought the outfit for her on a reconciliation trip to Japan is recounted with a barbed raillery that makes you chuckle at the same time you admire her gallant bluntness. And Miss Baddeley's bits of posturing like a Kabuki actress (she had lessons, you know) is capital fooling.
Mr. Williams evidently has an endless gallery of the wonderfully amusing and pathetic elderly woman. But in the end Flora lacks the size to support the burden the playwright would impose on her- to serve, as he says in a program note, as a protagonist who is not a human being but a universal condition of human beings: The apparently incomprehensible but surely somehow significant adventure of being alive that we all must pass through for a time."
In its effort to disclose how Flora finally reaches for the comfort and grace that will make dying bearable, the play is wanting. For the character who passes this miracle for her is one of those handsome, pallid young men with a dead heart, who has become a fashionable symbol for some of our playwrights. Although Paul Robeling plays the young man earnestly enough, the figure is utterly inconvincing. As a result, the play's denouement leaves one oddly untouched.
Mildred Dunnock, as a sharp-tongued old witch like Flora herself, floats in wearing gauzy brown and looking like a superannuated ballerina prima assoluta. She and Miss Baddeley have a marvelously comic scene which they do a turn. Ann Williams is sympathetic as a put- upon, intelligent secretary.
Herbert Machiz has staged the piece at the Morosco, where it opened Wednesday, with consistently droll invention that always suggests the hidden fear. Jo Mielziner's flexible sets have the brightness and color of the Italian landscape. The costumes by Peter Hall and Fred Zoelpel and the music by Paul Bowles contributes to the atmosphere of sumptuousness and decay.
A terrified comic ferocity courses through "Milk Train" but the play generates little pity. By the standards of other lesser playwrights this is impressive work. By Mr. Williams's criteria it is disappointing because its resolution is hard to credit.
'Milk Train'By HOWARD TAUBMAN On one level Tennessee Williams is writing with unexampled mastery in "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore." On another and higher level, which few contemporary playwrights dare to attempt, Mr. Williams's new play fails.Mr. Williams's main character is so scrupulously and humorously observed, so painted to the life with all her vitality and crotchets and pain that one feels this portrait could be hung with the old masters.Flora Goforth is a dying woman with a flamboyant past and a bruising tongue. She sits on a mountain top on the coast of Italy with her three villas wired for sound so that she will not lose an instant when the impulse seizes her to continue dictating her memoirs.She is coarse and coy, wise and foolish, vulnerable and tyrannical. She is full of pretense, yet has reached the point of no more pretense. She recalls her first five husbands with a pungent, sardonic objectivity, and for a moment she almost croons over the recollection of Alex the sixth, last and only attractive one.Hermione Baddeley plays this crude yet uncommon woman with dazzling variety. Her voice has more compass and nuance than the subtlest of singers. She can be droll in the clownish way Mr. Williams means her to be, and she can be as lazily forthright as the sun that beats down on the Italian sea.Preparing for dinner an interrupting her dressing with bursts of dictation into one of the ubiquitous mikes, she puts on a Kabuki gown and a black wig with delightfully raffish humor. Her recollection that one of her husbands bought the outfit for her on a reconciliation trip to Japan is recounted with a barbed raillery that makes you chuckle at the same time you admire her gallant bluntness. And Miss Baddeley's bits of posturing like a Kabuki actress (she had lessons, you know) is capital fooling.Mr. Williams evidently has an endless gallery of the wonderfully amusing and pathetic elderly woman. But in the end Flora lacks the size to support the burden the playwright would impose on her- to serve, as he says in a program note, as a protagonist who is not a human being but a universal condition of human beings: The apparently incomprehensible but surely somehow significant adventure of being alive that we all must pass through for a time."In its effort to disclose how Flora finally reaches for the comfort and grace that will make dying bearable, the play is wanting. For the character who passes this miracle for her is one of those handsome, pallid young men with a dead heart, who has become a fashionable symbol for some of our playwrights. Although Paul Robeling plays the young man earnestly enough, the figure is utterly inconvincing. As a result, the play's denouement leaves one oddly untouched.Mildred Dunnock, as a sharp-tongued old witch like Flora herself, floats in wearing gauzy brown and looking like a superannuated ballerina prima assoluta. She and Miss Baddeley have a marvelously comic scene which they do a turn. Ann Williams is sympathetic as a put- upon, intelligent secretary.Herbert Machiz has staged the piece at the Morosco, where it opened Wednesday, with consistently droll invention that always suggests the hidden fear. Jo Mielziner's flexible sets have the brightness and color of the Italian landscape. The costumes by Peter Hall and Fred Zoelpel and the music by Paul Bowles contributes to the atmosphere of sumptuousness and decay.A terrified comic ferocity courses through "Milk Train" but the play generates little pity. By the standards of other lesser playwrights this is impressive work. By Mr. Williams's criteria it is disappointing because its resolution is hard to credit.
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