A LOVELY SUNDAY
FOR CREVE COEUR

by Tennessee Williams

January 28 - February 14, 2010
Thurs. & Fri. 8:00 pm
Sat. 2 pm and 8 pm
Sun.  6 pm

 

Program Notes for

Tennessee Williams'
"A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur"

by Mark Cleveland

 


Tennessee Williams,
late in life

The Tennessee Williams of “Streetcar,” “Cat” and “Menagerie” is most often identified with New Orleans, once one of the greatest of American cities; now a blanched shadow of its former glory. It’s where he moved at 28 years of age and where he wrote his seminal works. But before he rechristened himself “Tennessee” by the mouth of the Mississippi, Thomas Lanier Williams was perhaps most formed by his adolescence in the quintessential turn-of-the-century American melting pot that was St. Louis, Missouri.

Now in long decline as the 52nd largest city in the US (Albuquerque is 59th), the St. Louis of the early 20th century was the 4th largest metropolis. In 1904, it hosted both the World’s Fair and the Olympics, a first for the Western Hemisphere for both events. During the late 19th and early 20th century, St. Louis’ aboriginal French and Indian population were augmented by waves of American immigrants seeking westward gold along with Germans and Irish escaping wars and famine in their native lands. Tens of thousands of African Americans joined them from the South during the Great Migration of 1910-1930.

 


Rose, Edwina and Tom


When Williams’ father, Cornelius, was promoted in 1918 to assistant sales manager for the largest shoe manufacturing company in the world, he located his wife, son and daughter, Rose, to its headquarters in St. Louis. Another son, Dakin, was born the next year. The family brought with them a black nurse, Ozzie, and a certain aristocratic bearing, a product of life in Tennessee and genteel Columbus, Mississippi. Tom was seven when his family located to the suburbs, and lived there, including a stint in 1932, at the insistence of his father, at the International Shoe Company, until finally moving to New Orleans in 1939.

Even during the Great Depression—the period in which “Creve Coeur” is set—the Williamses had maintained middle-class respectability amidst their German and Irish neighbors. Behind closed doors, Cornelius and wife Edwina would be at each other’s throats, and Rose was losing her mind; but to the community, he was a successful manager, she was a mother and member of the DAR and Rose was a debutante desperately negotiating the narrow, respectable path available to a young woman of her station.

 


The Towers, Creve Coeur Lake Park, from a tinted postcard printed in Germany, 1909
(click to enlarge)

Many years later, like the two great, declining cities with which he is most associated, the Tennessee Williams of 1978 had seen glory; but, more recently, failure and profound depression. Having struggled, mostly vainly, to regain success on Broadway and in Hollywood, he returned to his St. Louis roots to revisit a seminal theme in his works—the tragedy of living the expectations of others—but with an unexpected twist: this was to be a comedy; black to be sure, but delightfully funny throughout.

The setting is Creve Coeur, a St. Louis suburb named for an actual, small “broken heart”-shaped lake it surrounds. Pronounced by locals “creeve core” (Germans and Irish asserting linguistic hegemony over the original French occupants), we find four women struggling with their own dreams and expectations. Dorothea, a high school civics teacher (often compared by critics to Blanche, but much more meaningfully another variation on sister Rose) boards with “Bodey” Bodenheifer, her older second-generation German roommate. Dorothea is pitiably deluded in her hopes and aspirations for a respectable denouement with beau and boss, Ralph. Spinster Bodey recognizes the impending disaster and instead hopes to live a vicarious love by setting Dorothea up with her twin bovine brother, Buddy, much talked of, but never seen on stage. Helena, another teacher at Dorothea’s school, clear-sighted about Dorothea’s desperate fantasy but blind to her own, visits to “rescue” Dorothea for a better situation among more respectable people in a better part of town. Through it all, Miss Gluck, herself freshly arrived from Germany, dive bombs from the apartment above to express an inconsolable grief, auf Deutsch, for her newly deceased mother.

“Creve Coeur” ran only three weeks at its premiere and has been seen rarely since, a fate unjustified for a mature creation of an acknowledged master. Like the “lesser” plays of other greats, “Creve Coeur” is a neglected gem, sure in characterization, language and theme. If it doesn’t have the sheer dramatic range of the Big Three, it is no less secure in its sympathetic and whimsical portrayal of American women struggling to find meaning in a threatening and absurd world.