Theatre for a New Audience to Present Talk With John Lahr About ORPHEUS DESCENDING

Theatre for a New Audience will present a talk by John Lahr about Tennessee Williams and Orpheus Descending. Lahr is the first-ever critic to win a Tony Award, and in 2015 his book Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh won the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography. This special event with the acclaimed author and critic—and dramaturg for TFANA’s current production of Orpheus Descending, directed by Erica Schmidt and featuring Maggie Siff and Pico Alexander—takes place at 5pm on Sunday, July 16, following the matinee performance of the play.

Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending tells the story of the passion of two outcasts—Lady Torrance, a storekeeper’s wife and daughter of a murdered Sicilian bootlegger, and Val, a wandering guitar player—and their attempt to escape from a Southern Hell. Set in a small town dry-goods store in the Deep South, Orpheus Descending is a toxic brew of racist violence, bigotry, misogyny, sexual passion, and longing for liberation.

Lahr describes and contextualizes the play: “In [this play], Williams told his audience, ‘You will find the trail of my sleeve-worn heart.’ But that heart had changed dramatically between when the story was first minted in 1941 as Battle of Angels and sixteen years later whenOrpheus Descending was staged. In his rebellion against the monolithic puritanism of his Episcopal upbringing, Williams bet his life on his imagination and romantic transformation. He embraced the unlearning of repression. ‘I, too, am beginning to feel an immense need to become a savage and to create a new world.’ Williams used this Strindberg quote as the epigraph to Battle of Angels. His hero Val Xavier—a name Williams was thinking of using as his nom de plume before he hit on ‘Tennessee’—is a hunted primitive saint, an agent of change, rattling the cage of propriety. Val is the first of many avatars of deliberate regression.

“But,” continues Lahr, “by the time he came to rewrite the play, Williams couldn’t, he said, ‘be the best part of myself anymore.’ Val is the embodiment of this moral exhaustion and Williams’s fight against the corruption of his spirit, that longing to walk on ‘heavenly grass’ as Val sings. In Orpheus Descending, Val is now a vagrant, jaded sensualist ‘fighting his own descent into a hell of his own making,’ Williams told the Miami Herald in 1956. During the gestation of Battle of Angels, Williams himself had been a pilgrim soul, a newcomer to ‘the trapeze of the flesh,’ living from hand to mouth, with a literary reputation to gain and nothing to lose. By the time the story had reached its final form in 1957, Williams was struggling with a sense that his heart had atrophied: ‘we persist, like the cactus,’ he wrote in his notebook. He had not so much transcended his wounded self as been trapped by his attempts to escape it. Val’s battle, like Williams’s, is not just with the society around him but with himself, ‘engaged in his struggle to maintain his integrity and purity…a duality not reconciled.’”

Orpheus Descending is TFANA’s first production of a play by Tennessee Williams and the final production of TFANA’s 22-23 Season which included: Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski by Derek Goldman and Clark Young; Des Moines by Denis Johnson; Experimental Workshop productions of Shakespeare’s Richard II and Henry IV, adapted by Dakin Matthews; and Lope De Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna, translated by Adrian Mitchell.

Maggie Siff (Billions, Mad Men, and Sons of Anarchy) plays Lady Torrance and Valentine Xavier, a wandering guitar player, is performed by Pico Alexander (Catch 22, Simon Stephens’ Punk Rock, and A.R. Gurney’s What I Did Last Summer).

About John Lahr 

John Lahr has been a contributor to the New Yorker since 1991, where for twenty-one years he was its Senior Drama Critic, the longest run in that position in the magazine’s history. He is the author of eighteen books including Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Harold D.Vursell Award for Quality of Prose, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is the first critic to win a Tony Award for co-authoring Elaine Stritch at Liberty.

About Theatre for a New Audience

Founded in 1979 by Jeffrey Horowitz, and led by Horowitz and Managing Director, Dorothy Ryan, Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) is home for Shakespeare and other contemporary playwrights. It nurtures artists, culture, and community. Recognizing that each audience is new and different from the last one, TFANA is dedicated to forging an exchange between artist and playgoer that is immediate and direct, and to the ongoing search for a living, human theatre.

With Shakespeare as its supreme guide, TFANA explores the ever-changing forms of world theatre and builds a dialogue spanning centuries between the language and ideas of Shakespeare and diverse authors, past and present. TFANA is committed to building long-term associations with artists from around the world and supporting the development of plays, translations, and productions through residences, workshops, and commissions. TFANA performs for an audience of all ages and backgrounds; is devoted to economic access; and promotes a vibrant exchange of ideas through its humanities and education programs.

TFANA’s productions have played nationally, internationally and on Broadway. In 2001, it became the first American theatre company invited to bring a production of Shakespeare to the Royal Shakespeare Company.

TFANA created and runs the largest in-depth program to introduce Shakespeare and classic drama in New York City’s Public Schools. Since its inception in 1984, the program has served more than 140,000 students.

In 2013, TFANA opened its first permanent home, Polonsky Shakespeare Center (PSC), in the Brooklyn Cultural District. The heart of PSC is its performance space: the 299-seat Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage, a uniquely flexible space with extraordinary acoustics, capable of multiple configurations between stage and audience; as well as the 50-seat Theodore C. Rogers Studio.

In addition to productions, TFANA supports ongoing artistic development through the Merle Debuskey Studio Program, which provides artists with residencies and workshops to create and explore outside the pressures of full production.

TFANA honors the Lenape and Canarsie People, on whose ancestral homeland Polonsky Shakespeare Center is built. The organization is committed to rethinking the stories it tells about our history and our connection to each other.

TFANA’s 2022-23 Season is dedicated to Celebrating the Memory of Peter Brook. From 2008-2019, TFANA was honored to present seven New York Premieres of works by Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Beckett and new plays by Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne directed by Peter or co-directed by Peter and Marie-Hélène.

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