It’s not often that one thinks of Tennessee Williams as having a light hand at drawing the human condition. But it surely shows in A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur.
It’s a Sunday morning in June, the sun is up, a pigeon coos outside the window of a small apartment in St. Louis. Dorothea (Maggie Wininger) is a single woman, a teacher at nearby Blewett School, which was, at the time of the play, a high school on Enright Avenue, just off Union. She shares the apartment with Bodey (Kelley Weber), an older woman who works at International Shoe. Dorothea’s waiting for a phone call from the man she’s dating, who’s her principal at the school. Bodey’s frying chicken. She’s putting together an outing to Creve Coeur Park, then the terminus of a trolley that ran down Delmar, through Overland and out to Creve Coeur Lake. She still hopes that Dorothea and her portly brother will hit it off, an idea Dorothea has repeatedly nixed in favor of the principal, who’s so fancy he drives a REO Flying Cloud.
The two women are very different. Dorothea, who’s moved from Memphis, is very conscious of her appearance and is very focused on having a husband and family. Bodey is a bustling hausfraulein who knows she’ll probably never marry but focuses on the pleasures of right now – and of getting her brother settled, despite his cigars and rumpled appearance. Two guests arrive. One is another tenant, Miss Gluck (Ellie Schwetye), for her daily coffee and consolation over the recent death of her mother. The other is the icily magnificent Helena (Julie Layton), an art history teacher at Blewett, who’s very mysterious about the reasons for her unexpected call.
Kari Ely directed this surprising piece of fun with its rapid-fire dialogue, some of which is exceedingly amusing. It takes place in Ali Strelchun’s wonderful set, all light and color. Watching the actors come up the center aisle upstairs at the Grandel, where it’s staged, is a nice preview of what’s to come, Weber’s Bodey a masterpiece of bustling, for instance.
Some discussion of Dorothea in recent years has the character a faded Southern belle, in the style of some other Williams women, but Wininger looks and acts younger. Maybe we don’t regard a teacher in perhaps her mid to late 20’s as aging, but things have changed since the mid-Thirties when the play is set. Wininger is more dazzled and determined than desperate, which works very well. Weber’s Bodey has a warm, kind heart that tries to protect her roommate and settle her into the sort of domesticity that she always wanted for herself. Only a remarkable performance by Julie Layton can hold up to the magnificence of her hat, the product of Garth Dunbar, the costume designer. And Ellie Schwetye is a sobbing black stork, only occasionally breaking into heavily accented English.
Not among the greatest of Williams’ works, certainly, but how fun to see him at play!
A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur
through May 19
Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis
Grandel Theatre