On 2/7/15, I attended a performance of Shelley Herman Gillon and Harriet McFaul Pilger's A House of Glass. The musical had intrigued and excited me, as I have long been a fan of the works of Tennessee Williams, having been born and raised in the South. Little more than a week away from my most favorite holiday, Mardi Gras, I felt in a festive mood for the night's performance.
Prior to the performance, I overhead discussion that the writers had been told that they had a musical and a play struggling for dominance and that one would need to be sacrificed for the good of the work. Sadly, what was needed here was a full abortion of these malformed and dreary twins. For the next ninety minutes, the story rambled between one overblown and weary stereotype, from gay man to southern belle to tortured soul. The writing felt unimaginative like the playwrights simply regurgitated textbook tidbits from Williams' life. I had some hope near the start when Williams was featured bent over a typewriter while characters from his work complained about his treatment of them and spurred him on to write better for them. Sadly, this line was not developed any further, so like so much of the work, it amounted to nothing more than a meaningless tangent. Sadly, it was not just the spoken parts that failed to fire, but also the musical numbers. While the lack of controlling vision in the writing itself proved to be the work's cardinal sin, a few sins in acting and on the technical front also worked to further undermine the musical. During the singing portions, the microphones were turned up too loud. In a small setting, as A House of Glass, was performed in, I question the need for microphones period. If the producers and director wished for them, they should have done a better job in sound testing to insure the voices wouldn't become so distorted during the musical portions to obscure the words and have theatre goers calling into question the vocal talents of the actors. Clearly modern day props set amongst period pieces also distracted me from the events. The tissue box could have been camouflaged with some paper wrapped around it or perhaps one of those plastic boxes made to decorate cardboard boxes. Many of the actors put on overdone southern accents that sounded like something out of an audition for a Colonel Sanders commercial and even those with a more realistic sounding voice would often lapse out of the accent. Since this is acting, it would have been fine to forgo the fake accents - the work would not have suffered for it. Of course, had the writing itself been better, I might never have noticed these smaller problems. The work had promise to be something better. You could see it in the moments when characters came to life to torture Williams or where Williams addressed the audience, but the writers left those moments undeveloped and underused, so that all that was left seemed like a misbegotten amalgam of textbook history and fits and starts of true creativity.
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she shakes up, wakes up, gets made up
weary of the game and wary of the loneliness she's living in a well made fortress, placed the stones up, down, all around to be safe threw true love away for something called security in the glare of another dark night security looks like smoke haze, furtive glances, alcoholic eyes that eat up every inch of soul not claimed hearts hard and scared if there ever were any there she won't find what the darker corners of her soul crave so a life more like a living death rolls on and before long it will be a morning again, lost and empty, that will dawn on some version of herself that she can't recognize and that is beyond saving |
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