One of Tennessee Williams’ final plays, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, was first produced in 1979, four years before he died. This piece is rarely revived. The relatively new company La Femme Theatre has a mission to celebrate and explore the universal female experience. As an added bonus, one of my favorite performers, the usually hilarious and talented Kristine Nielsen (Hir, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike) costars.
Creve Coeur is a park located in St. Louis. The setting is a small working class apartment in 1937. Bodey (Ms. Nielsen) shares her apartment with Dorothea (Jean Lichty), a high school civics teacher with more than a crush on the school principal. The play opens with her waiting for a promised phone call from him. She is classically written in the Blanche DuBois mold; fading beauty and delusional dreamer. Every Sunday, Bodey packs a lunch to go to Creve Coeur with a not-so-subtle attempt to fix Dorothea up with her slovenly brother.
Despair, desperation and loneliness are key themes in this work. Miss Gluck (Polly McKie) is the deeply grieving upstairs neighbor who has just lost her mother and is living alone. The kind-hearted Bodey is consoling her with coffee and crullers every day. Dorothea cannot deal with Miss Gluck’s depressed countenance, hysterical crying and aggressive ranting in her native German. Dorothea’s coworker Helena (Annette O’Toole) makes a surprise visit and her haughtiness sparks conflict with Bodey’s calculated kindness and sets the tone for an exercise in verbally eviscerating combat.
A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur is a tragicomedy with four meaty roles for actresses to play. The meanness of women (especially to each other) is certainly on display here but with added layers of fear, dreams, self-protection and gut instincts. Everyone is damaged; some have more highly developed coping skills. The performances are mixed. Ms. Nielsen’s tragic moments are heart wrenching in their emotional availability. Her comedic line readings are directly from the “Best of Kristine Nielsen” playbook. Fans know what that means. Here it occasionally registers a bit too big but admittedly this play has slow moments to fill.
Ms. Lichty and Ms. McKie nicely inhabit their very different roles despite the nuttiness of the plotlines. Ms. O’Toole’s characterization of the highfalutin Helena seemed quite starchy for my tastes; too one dimensionally prim for all the harshness written into the role. The play is unabashedly kooky so these actresses have to traverse massive mood swings. Creve Coeur is a long one act piece and the tempo dragged a number of times. Austin Pendleton directed these ladies to play the scenes fairly bluntly. Oddly the set designer (Harry Feiner) and the director were out of synch. Sometimes there would be eavesdropping near the imaginary door between rooms. Other times these women directly confronted each other face to face over furniture where there had recently been an imaginary wall.
There are good reasons to see A Lovely Sunday in Creve Coeur, particularly if you enjoy Tennessee Williams. Last spring, Classic Stage Company (with the Transport Group) mounted an outstanding version of Summer and Smoke. His plays are rich with imperfect souls. If you come to see this production, sit very close to the front. Some lines were hard to hear in Row A. I understood why people in the back were complaining on the way out. For emotionally scarring melodrama to work, it has to be audible.