first night review: orpheus descending @ the Marquette Theatre

Photo by Brittney Werner

​Orpheus Descending @ The Marquette Theatre
Review by Dorian Hatchett

It’s easy to run out of superlatives when you’re writing about the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company. Opening Night of its Tenth season, and I could have been excited to watch these artfully casted actors read the phone book.  

What I got though, was a performance that left me at times bereft, ashamed, exalted, and with just enough comedic timing to question the intentions of a supposedly just God. Tennessee Williams wrote a direct line to the complex and conflicted soul of man, and with Orpheus Descending, what I saw on stage was a three hour seance; an invocation of the master playwright’s spirit.

A reworking of one of his earlier plays, Orpheus Descending premiered on Broadway in 1957. The scene is set in a mercantile in an unnamed southern town. The townsfolk bandy about casual vulgarity, gossiping about each other and the events of their lives both banal and salacious in equal measure. They are small town personified, lacking any kind of empathy for anyone they consider “other” and instead, tallying the traumas in the lives of others as though their witness validates their small-mindedness.  

Valentine Xavier (played by Benjamin Dougherty) is the force of nature that upsets the delicate balance of two-faced pandering, as the traveling musician takes a job in the town dry goods store. The owner Lady Torrance (Leslie Claverie) is a first generation American who has resigned herself to a life simply survived, and in meeting and getting to know Valentine, gets to feel the discomfort and elation of a mind expanded.  

The everyday miseries of a loveless marriage and being the focus of the local rumor mill have worn her down to a shell of a person and seeing the potential for a life well lived, she cannot continue in what she recognizes as her past, opting to face a new life and a new future no matter what the cost. In true Greek tragedy fashion, the third act of the play coalesces in cruelty rather than redemption, and the story of Orpheus and Eurydice is complete.  

Williams consistently writes excellent supporting roles, and Carol Cutrere (Charlie Carr) is no exception. A free-wheeling spirit whose excesses bring shame to her family, she floats in and out of the action, refusing to go where she’s told out of a drive for exploration, or maybe just a contrarian streak.

She talks often of New Orleans, and one might posit that she represents the soul of unbound vice that the city reputation carries across the south. Carol’s soliloquy “the Fugitive Kind” closes the show on a note of heartache, interrogating the value of an unexamined life and the questions we choose not to ask ourselves.  

Orpheus Rising runs through April 13th at the Marquette Theatre at Loyola University. 
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