Jan. 19--A belated Christmas card has just arrived in Chicago theater. It's a bit grimy around the edges and smells like it spent the holidays passed out in a gin joint. But tarnished tinsel still shines brightly, if you get it in the right light.
And "The Mutilated," Tennessee Williams' rarely-performed one-act, gets a big-hearted and full-throated production with A Red Orchid Theatre under Dado's direction. It doesn't make the case for the play as a neglected masterpiece. But it's a trippy and ultimately rewarding 90 minutes designed to blow away the mid-January doldrums with a demented kind of joy.
First presented with "The Gnadiges Fraulein" as a very short-lived 1966 Broadway double bill titled "Slapstick Tragedy," Williams' play feels a bit like a Nativity pageant scored by Tom Waits. It's set in the same kind of down-at-heels transient French Quarter hotel Williams explored in "Vieux Carre," with his trademark women of a certain age and uncertain futures grappling with their lost dreams.
The women in question are Celeste Delacroix Griffin (Jennifer Engstrom), who has just been sprung from the pokey on Christmas Eve after a shoplifting charge, and Trinket (Mierka Girten), her erstwhile friend at the Silver Dollar Hotel whose surgery for breast cancer has left her "mutilated." The two are at loggerheads when the play begins. Celeste has lost her room, and her brother Henry (Doug Vickers), who bailed her out, has made it clear that she's not welcome for Christmas dinner -- or any time. Desperate, Celeste tries to get back into Trinket's good graces, but is rebuffed. "We can't bury the hatchet," Girten's Trinket yells through the door. "We hit each other too hard." In revenge, Celeste reveals Trinket's seemingly shameful "secret" mutilation in graffiti on the bathroom wall.
Over the long night, the two end up in the same bar, where Trinket picks up a sailor (Steve Haggard) in order to convince herself of her desirability and Celeste fails to pick up any men who might be able to fill her dwindling coffers. Throughout, a gallery of New Orleans grotesques and eccentrics -- especially Natalie West's dancing "Bird Girl" and her musical master, Maxie (Shade Murray) -- provide snapshots of life on the fringe. Of the seemingly abused Bird Girl, Celeste observes to the audience that "If she was a bird, the Humane Society would be interested in her situation." Since she is merely human, of course they are not.
Brando Triantafillou's musical direction and original music, fleshing out some of the whacked-out carols created by Williams and played by an onstage ensemble decked out in Karen Kawa's eye-catching costumes (including several with echoes of angels, shepherds, and other Nativity favorites), adds an oddly affecting spiritual element. But this is a human comedy -- Williams' usual obsessions on human appetites and what happens to those who are thwarted from sating those desires gets played for laughs more than sorrow. "As long as you have longing, satisfaction is possible," Engstrom's Celeste notes right after chowing down on a string of popcorn from the sad tree in the hotel lobby.
Engstrom and Girten play beautifully in sync with each other. The latter's more contained heiress-in-hiding (Trinket apparently lives off the proceeds of a West Texas "gusher" left to her by her father) finds a streak of boldness despite her "mutilation" as the story unfolds. Engstrom's one-woman id tsunami goes for broke with hilarious effect, stretching syllables to improbable lengths and affecting a grande dame air completely at odds with her increasingly askew hair and ratty fur coat. She can't possibly do the bakery job her brother has set up for her, she explains to hotel clerk Bernie (Lance Baker), because "I'm too imaginative to feel with bread." It's a line that sounds like something Little Edie would say in "Grey Gardens."
Underneath the slapstick, what comes through clearly in Dado's sensitive direction is that these two wounded and desperate souls can only find balm with each other. That is also what makes us feel for them even as we laugh. "It's the lack of what we want most that makes us cruel," Trinket observes. And what both these women want -- what we all want -- is someone to keep our secrets. Or at least to help us feel that our secret shames are part of what makes us beautiful, not mutilated.
Kerry Reid is a freelance critic.
ctc-arts@tribpub.com
Review: 'The Mutilated'
3.5 STARS
When: Through Feb. 28
Where: A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells St.
Running time: 90 minutes
Tickets: $30-$35 at 312-943-8722 or aredorchidtheatre.org
