Review: Gifted Women Define Tennessee Williams Tender Heartbreak at MCT

Misfits: The 2016-2017 theme for Milwaukee Chamber Theatre's season. A little known Tennessee Williams play, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur provides Williams' misfits, four "women of a certain age," a stage for exposing their misfortunes in St. Louis, the 1930's. In a place "just a street car ride away from a cooling Sunday afternoon picnic" at Lake Creve Coeur, Missouri, the misfits uncover what their lives might be in the future. A stage where their adventures appear courtesy of the up and coming Director Leda Hoffman who transforms Kay Allmand, Kelly Doherty, Molly Rhode and Karen Estrada on a set where "roses explode like a bombshell of clashing colors" designed by Courtney O'Neill. In fact, the entire production becomes a tour de force for women in the theater, on stage and behind the scenes.

A play written late in Williams' life, crave coeur literally means heartbreak, and perhaps only Williams could place these particular four women, the two roommates Dorothea and Brodey, and their friends, the art teacher, Helena, and a manic-depressive Sophie Gluck, in one room where there is an actual lake named Creve Coeur. The quartet clamors amid those clashing colors and provides a treasure trove of heartbreak amid humor and friendship, coffee and crullers, and one must experience this MCT production with the heart. Or as Brodey rails to Helena, "You can't catch heartbreak if you have no heart."

There's plenty of heart in Williams' small apartment. Dorothea, a high school civics teacher, waits for a phone call from her high school principle, who has been leading her on a romantic road to no where. A second generation German roommate Brodey tries to cajole her friend into a picnic at Creve Coeur with her twin brother, Buddy, on a Sunday afternoon, a picnic they do together every Sunday. The upper crust Helena woos Dorothea to move to a more expensive, exclusive apartment away form those "explosion of flowers on a wall." while Sophie suffers from the trauma of her mother's death, and comes down to see Brodey for coffee and crullers every day.

Allmand's Dorothea and Doherty's Brodey discover an uncommon sisterhood onstage--Two women decidedly different in personality, the women need each other in this odd friendship. Both actresses catch the nuance of their characters, Doherty offering warmth to Brodey's boldness, and Allmand giving strength to Dorothea when confronted with disappointment and a physical heart condition that often weakens her.

Rhode's Helena offers the upper class crustiness while her character deals with her own loneliness without ever appearing completely inhumane. Her character a direct counterpoint to Estrada's Sophie Gluck, a soul that Estrada keeps endearing and human while speaking guttural German slang or using every facial and body expression possible to convey Sophie's depression. There's more feminine prowess on the Broadway Center Studio Theatre stage than imaginable despite the levels of continual heartbreak.

Williams' offers a tender portrait of these four women thrown together by career and chance that rings true forty years later-and Hoffmann subtly let these characters and their feminine humanity shine through while the production strikes a contemporary note. The heartbreak of poor body image, ethnicity, death, economic stress, hearing loss, infertility, loneliness, and finding an equal in their life to what Dorothea names "romance,' with her fantasy man the high school principle, or Buddy, Bodey's cigar smoking, beer drinking brother, still happens today, and can be palpably felt from these characters, these apparent "misfits" on stage. When actually, there's many lonely women, and men, who still experience this same disillusionment in life. On a lovely fall evening, MCT proves once again crave coeur, or heartbreak, can be resolved with the compassionate touch of true friendship.

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre presents Tennessee Williams' A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur at the Broadway Theatre Center through October 16. For further information or tickets, please call: 414.291.7800 or www.milwaukeechambertheatre.com.

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