Message from the Artistic Director: The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore

Tennessee Williams is one of the best-known American Playwrights of the 20th Century, and in this centennial year of his birth, it seems fitting to bring you one of his most complex pieces of work. Over the years on Roundabout's stages, you have seen everything from Williams' early classics like A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie to the less-frequently-staged Suddenly Last Summer and The Night of the Iguana. Through these productions, you've had an opportunity to truly get to know this complicated playwright, which I think makes you the ideal audience for Milk Train, a thorny, rarely-producEd Williams gem. Michael Wilson, this production's director, spent ten years bringing the plays of Williams to his audience at Hartford Stage Company, knowing that Williams is a playwright to be savored, one who evolved a great deal throughout his career. Although he would continue to tackle certain themes and characters, much changed in Williams' life, and in the world, between his first success with The Glass Menagerie in 1945 and the first production of Milk Train eighteen years later. Knowing his work so well now, I think you are ready to embrace a play from that later, more multifaceted period.

Milk Train tells the story of Flora Goforth, an aging Southern lady who, after six husbands and a life of wealth and adventure, is hiding out on the coast of Italy in her secluded villa, writing her memoirs and ignoring her own illness. Flora is a late addition to Williams' collection of ferocious Southern women, in the tradition of Amanda Wingfield and Blanche DuBois. But unlike those ladies, Flora isn't in the midst of battle with a tough day-to-day existence - she's struggling with facing the end of her life head-on.

In many ways, Milk Train is a memory play like The Glass Menagerie. But while Tom Wingfield was looking back on his youth with the guilt of a survivor who isn't in control of his past, Flora is the driving force of her own memories. She dictates (in the truest sense of the word) her memoirs to her beleaguered secretary, determined to write her own legacy and be remembered in the way she chooses. She is a woman in denial - her body is in decline, but she soldiers on with both pride and desperation, trying to put her life on paper as though only that physical evidence will prove that she truly lived.

Into her world on the Divina Costiera comes the mysterious Christopher Flanders, a poet and artist who has gained the unfortunate reputation of being an "Angel of Death," always appearing at the bedside of wealthy older women shortly before their deaths. His presence in Flora's villa raises many questions: Is Chris here to save her? To usher her peacefully out of life? Or to take advantage of a sick old woman? Chris has the potential to be a devil, or to be the savior that Williams' other grand ladies never had. The Gentleman Caller failed to save Amanda and Laura from loneliness; Mitch was unable to save Blanche from a breakdown. Perhaps, writing this play much later in his own life, Williams was finally ready to offer peace to one of his characters.

I think this complicated question of the relationship between Chris and Flora is in large part why Milk Train is one play that Williams continued to revise over and over again throughout his later career. He first wrote about these characters in a short story called "Man Bring This Up Road," which eventually was the basis for the play. When Milk Train had its New York premiere in 1963, it was met with a mostly negative response, but Williams was given the rare opportunity to revise the piece and see it mounted again on Broadway only a year later, with a new cast and director. He would continue to revise it as the years went on, and the changes that he made to the text are a fascinating reflection of the author's state of mind. The original draft was written as Williams watched his longtime companion dying of cancer, which undoubtedly affected his approach to writing about mortality. Later, he moved into an experimental phase with his work, influenced by less naturalistic writers and by Japanese culture. The version of the play that you'll be seeing hews closest to Williams' earlier drafts, but Michael Wilson has studied all of the scripts extensively, and he has pieced elements of each of them together to create a best possible Milk Train as it has never been seen before.

There's something that I find so gripping about Flora's battle against mortality, and each time I read the play, I feel differently about why Chris has come into her life at this moment and whether he is there to help or to harm her. This element of mystery makes Milk Train a challenging play, but I'm excited to take on that challenge and bring you something unexpected and unfamiliar from such an iconic playwright. And I cannot wait for you to see the brilliant performance of the great Olympia Dukakis as Flora Goforth. She is frightening, funny, and utterly unforgettable.

I hope that you will be as moved by this work as I am and that Milk Train will provoke you to reexamine your notions about the work of Tennessee Williams. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised to see a new side of a writer we know so well. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this production, and I will eagerly await your emails to me at artisticoffice@roundabouttheatre.org.

I look forward to seeing you at the theatre!

Todd Haimes
Artistic Director