Q&A with Michael Wilson, Director of The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore

Michael Wilson, director of the upcoming The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, sits down with Roundabout's resident dramaturg, Ted Sod, to discuss this much-anticipated production.

Ted Sod: Why did you want to direct The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore?

Michael Wilson: Tennessee Williams is the reason I am in the theatre today.   Growing up in North Carolina, I always loved plays from the time I was introduced to them in pre-school.  It quickly became my preferred way of hearing a story.  Many people say they simply can't read plays; they find them incomplete, or much less satisfying than prose.  But I have always loved reading dialogue, and imagining settings as described by playwrights in their stage directions.  For me, plays allow even more room for the imagination.  They demand for their reader to dream the behavior of their characters - their dress, their movement, and the inflections in their speech - and conjure the action of the story.

I can still remember reading A Streetcar Named Desire late one night in my bedroom.  The play shattered me.  Not only because of what unfolds when Blanche Dubois descends from Laurel, MI into the netherworld abyss of New Orleans, but how Tennessee expressed his vision of that descent: his use of rich, poetic language, his overtly theatrical use of light, shadow and sound.  I was so terrified by the time I got to the end of the play that I couldn't fall asleep.  Who was this writer who, through the power of his words and the gift of his human insights, invoked such a harrowing experience inside me?

In high school, I set about to read everything that Tennessee ever wrote.  I learned that Tennessee was America's most celebrated playwright (along with Arthur Miller) in the post World War II years, but that in the early 1960's, he and his plays began to be dismissed and would continue to be shunned by critics and audiences alike until he died an ignominious death in an Upper East Side hotel room at the age of 72 in 1983, the year I graduated from high school.  I wondered if a great playwright's powers could really dim so significantly as to really no longer have the ability to write a compelling play, or if in fact like Picasso, Tennessee had actually begun to create in a style very different from the one which had brought him fame and fortune, and because of that, these later works were not being properly read or heard.

When I first started directing plays in college, I selected Tennessee's last Broadway work, his "ghost" play about F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald titledClothes for a Summer Hotel.  I found immense riches in a play that had been much maligned by critics.  I decided then that I wanted to explore Tennessee's late, neglected plays as much as I did his confirmed masterworks.

After I graduated from Chapel Hill in 1987, I moved north to Cambridge, from where I would frequently take the train into New York to see plays.  That fall, I saw the first Off-Broadway revival of The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore starring Elizabeth Ashley, Stephen MacHattie, Amanda Plummer and Marian Seldes at the WPA Theatre in Chelsea.  I didn't know what the hell was happening on stage when I first discovered Summer Hotel in college, but I knew that I was transported in the same way I had been when I first read Street Car in high school. 10 years later, in 1997, I would make my Off-Broadway debut at the same WPA Theatre directing the New York premiere of Tennessee's little known play about the Kennedy Assassination entitled The Red Devil Batter Sign starring Elizabeth Ashley.

So now, over 30 years after I first encountered Tennessee on the page, and 24 years after the last New York revival of Milk Train, I have the opportunity to direct this mysterious, beautiful and deeply human play.  Only now, I have directed 18 other plays by Tennessee, and am seeking to bring the experience of telling his stories to bear on this1963 play that comes in the canon after his last commercial success, The Night of the Iguana in 1961. Milk Train marks the beginning of what is commonly referred to as the "late (euphemism for inferior) plays," the onset of Tennessee's "Stoned Age," when his writing was fueled by an almost lethal combination of drugs and alcohol.  And yet, I believe that audiences will discover a very coherent, extremely moving play when they come see Milk Train.

TS:  What do you think the play is about?

MW: As with most of Tennessee's plays, Milk Train is about an intense desire to live life to its fullest, and most sensual, an immense longing to have more life, more love, to crush the loneliness both with-in and with-out, all the while trying to stave off mortality.

Tennessee gives us one of his classic quartets: Flora Goforth, a rich former beauty of a certain age who is writing her memoirs in the summer while avoiding a serious illness that threatens to take her life; Christopher Flanders, a down and out poet/con-man who battles the loss of his youth by endearing himself to ever older, ever more terminal wealthy ladies;  Frances Black (Blackie),  Ms. Goforth's secretary, who has not yet recovered from the loss of her late young husband, turns to Chris for salvation; and the Witch of Capri, who wages a war with his old friend Flora for Chris's affection.

Just as he does in Night of the Iguana, Tennessee explores the limitations of a life lived solely for the pleasures of flesh, contrasting it with the deeper, more elusive fulfillment of the spirit and one's soul.

TS: How did you research the world of the play? What kind of research did you have to do in order to direct it?

MW: Tennessee began writing many of his plays as short stories.  Milk Trainbegan as a short story called Man Bring This up Road written in 1953.  The title refers to the book of poetry Chris Flanders brings to Flora Goforth both in the short story and play.  Milk Train is unique in that it had two Broadway productions - one in 1963, and another in 1964.  There are many versions of the play, pre-Broadway, an English version from 1965, and the 1968 screenplay which Williams wrote that became the movie Boom starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.  When working on a play such as Milk Train, which had a very tortured evolution with more than one director helping to shape the play, I think it's very important to read all of the versions available, so that you can better understand the playwright's original intent.  Because of my collaboration and friendship with Elizabeth Ashley, I was also able to review the textual choices made by director Kevin Conway and his cast made during the last New York revival of 1987.  Tennessee wrote many versions of all his plays, and for many of the late plays like Milk Train, one definitive version of the play does not exist.

In addition to reading as many different versions of the story that Tennessee himself wrote (short story, play, screenplay), it's important to research the time and place in which the play is set - the culture, the music, the art, and current events.  All of these can provide textures towards making a fully dimensioned stage world for the production.

TS:  What were you looking for in casting the play? What traits were you looking for from the actors?

MW: I was looking for a kind of fierceness, a fearlessness; actors who can go from 0 to 60, who can seem to be not acting at all (my very kind of acting),  then all of the sudden leap to a piercing outcry of desperation and loneliness, but all the while keeping it, making it real.  I wanted actors who possess an ability to make Tennessee's poetry their own.  Actors who were not afraid to be monsters, to be ugly, to be reviled, yet are also very handsome, sexy and beautiful.

TS: Can you describe your process in collaborating with your design team on this play?

MW: I love the design process, and I have worked with the designers for this production for almost 20 years.  We have a very intimate vocabulary.  They know that I am always searching to capture Tennessee's vivid theatricality in three dimensions, but to do that in a way that does not overwhelm the story, or make the characters seem phony or false.  The design elements must both elevate the performance to theatrical art, but also state simply to the audience where we are, who we are with, and when we are with them.  I don't like designs with capital I-Ideas - I want a fresh, imaginative visual look for the production that supports and reveals Tennessee's story and characters, but does not upstage them.

TS:  Has your understanding of the play changed since you directed it as part of the Tennessee Williams retrospective you produced at Hartford Stage? If so, how? What changes will there be in the NYC production?

MW: My understanding of Milk Train changes every day in rehearsal.  Tennessee wrote such infinitely rich characters in such complex circumstances that new layers of meaning are revealed on good days, and on bad days, you keep chasing them.  But it's the chase, the search, that's thrilling for all of us in the room.

Also, when I first directed Milk Train almost 3 years ago, I was that many years younger.  As we age, our experiences of plays shift.   Great plays often seem to change as we ourselves change. Sometimes you are more secure as an artist than others.  I understand more potently Goforth's fear of not finishing her memoirs before she dies; her need to create something, a tangible legacy before she passes.  I feel Chris's pain more as he questions the worthiness of his metal sculptures.

And the cast- three of the actors, Olympia, Maggie and Curtis, were in the 2008 production and we begin where we ended, and go now in search of more meaning, that which was somehow hidden from us before.  The new actors bring freshness and an essential objectivity.

Finally, we know now that Tennessee's play works and that Tennessee's play is a deeply affecting evening of theatre that holds audiences in a virtual trance.   The play's unvarnished depiction of characters clinging to life while confronting their own mortality is very vital to audiences today, who for the last decade have faced - with a mordant, resilient humor if lucky- an increasingly darker awareness of the chaos, the lostness, the seeming unreality of the world around us.  Having a sense that Milk Train may have finally found its time to be shared, to give people solace that they are not alone in these fears, gives you the courage to leap into even more shadowy aspects of the play.

We have a more intimate theatre at the Laura Pels than we had at Hartford Stage, 100 fewer seats, and a more smaller playing space, so that changes things immensely.

TS: What can you tell us about Tennessee Williams at the time he wrote this play? His partner, Frank Merlo, had just passed away -correct?

MW: Frank Merlo, Tennessee's partner of 14 years, died in between the two Broadway productions of Milk Train in 1963 and 1964.  His ghost hangs heavily over Flora's terror of her illness, Blackie's grief over her dead husband, and Tennessee's dream that Frank might have the gift of someone as handsome and sensitive as Chris to take Frank to the other side.  Tennessee could never be that for Frank; he was not a good nurse, and not the best partner in terms of providing comfort to one's loved one who is dying and in pain.  Tennessee had the courage and strength to write about it, but not to face it with Frank in real life.

TS: What inspires you as a director? Do you see other directors' work? Go to movies? Museums? Travel? What advice do you have for young people who want to direct for the theatre?

MW: Go, see, do everything that inspires - yes, theatre, movies,  TV, museums all do that for me, as does taking a long walk in the early morning when I can see and hear things that I would otherwise be closed to because I am in the middle of my busy day, or buried in my smart phone.  It's important to put our highly advanced technological devices away once and while and just be quiet.  Very important.

But mostly, if you want to be a director, you must love telling stories.  And if you want to direct for the theatre, you must love stories the way our playwrights tell them - through dialogue, some prose stage directions, and a lot of imagination.

You can see Tennessee Williams' The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymoreat the Laura Pels Theatre inside the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre beginning January 7 through April 3, 2011.