Daniel MacIvor’s play “His Greatness” was one of the hits of the recent NYC Fringe Festival.
The playwright’s imagining of a few days in the life of Tennessee Williams — near the end — is a well-written and well-acted piece about the sources of artistic inspiration and what happens when the ideas stop coming. In a subtitle, MacIvor describes the play as “Inspired by a Potentially True Story About Playwright Tennessee Williams.”
MacIvor takes us to Vancouver in the early 1980s where the Williams stand-in — known simply as The Playwright — has arrived to attend the opening of a regional theater production of a re-working of one of his poorly received “late” plays. It’s an experimental, tough-to-fathom drama such as Williams’s 1975 play “The Red Devil Battery Sign” about American paranoia in the wake of the Kennedy assassination — a piece the writer never quite “finished” but which received a memorable posthumous off-Broadway staging by Hartford Stage artistic director Michael Wilson with Elizabeth Ashley.
The good reviews and strong audience response to “His Greatness” have caused two well-deserved extensions of a play that should have a long life in regional theater — it feels true to the spirit of Williams both as an artist and as a troubled man in the many disappointing years that followed the playwright’s tremendous success in the 1940s and 1950s.
“His Greatness” has a plot somewhat similar to that of “Sweet Bird of Youth,” the 1959 Williams drama that followed an aging actress on the run from Hollywood to avoid the premiere of a film she is sure will finish off her career. The actress hooks up with a much-younger gigolo named Chance Wayne who hopes the star might be his ticket out of hustling.
In “His Greatness,” the playwright (given lots of authentic Tennessee Williams poetry and passion by Peter Goldfarb, above left) is travelling with The Assistant (Dan Domingues) who has grown tried of cleaning up the great man’s messes — both literal and figurative — and who is sick of the glorified pimping behind finding another Young Man (Michael Busillo, above right) who will be the writer’s escort to the opening of the play.
The situation is gripping and the parallels with “Sweet Bird” are clever. Unlike the actress in the Williams play — who gets a call from The Coast telling her the movie is a hit — the writer in MacIvor’s play is crushed when the regional theater production gets panned by the two local reviewers. The play reminds us of that terrible what-have-you-done-for-us-lately reception that plagued Williams after a series of Broadway flops in the 1960s and 1970s tarnished his reputation. What a shame that he could not escape the trap of “his greatness.”
(“His Greatness” is being performed Tuesday through Thursday at 8 p.m. at The Soho Playhouse, 15 Van Dam St. For ticket information go to www.sohoplayhouse.com.)
