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Reclining Standards

 

The Eccentricities of a Nightingale

by David Fox

September 7, 2018 

 

The moment Tina Brock arrives on stage in The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, the world—to quote another play by Tennessee Williams—is lit by lightning. Brock plays Miss Alma Winemiller, one of Williams’ most elliptical heroines. It’s arguably not an ideal marriage of actress and character (more on that later). But Brock, blonded and marcelled with a doll-like prettiness that is simultaneously exquisite and hard-edged, does something even bolder. She channels the essence of Williams’ women on a grander scale. The effect is disquieting and thrilling.

 

Seen here, she isn’t just Miss Alma. She’s Blanche Dubois, Alexandra Del Lago, Amanda Wingfield. Brock profoundly understands these Southern women—their pride and vulnerability, their humor, desperation, and anger. And she knows how to bring it to the stage in a brilliant performance, vibrating with energy and richly nuanced.

 

Will Miss Alma win the heart of Dr. John Buchanan (touchingly acted here by the endearing John Zak), whom she pursues through the play with such singular, elemental drive? You’ll need to see The Eccentricities of a Nightingale to find out. (And you must, if you have any interest in good theater and fine acting.) But I will tell you this: Tina Brock has the audience eating out of the palm of her hand from the get-go.

 

Eccentricities, Williams’ long-aborning reworking of his better-known Summer and Smoke, is itself a bit of a curiosity. The basic story (in brief: an oddball singing teacher, daughter of a small-town minister, sets her sights on the local doctor) remains the same, but the two titles are a pretty good summary of the shift in tone. The earlier play emphasizes sultry melodrama, with complicated, triangulated sexual dalliances on the front burner. Eccentricities is quirkier—shorter, leaner, and (especially as seen here) more bizarrely humorous.

 

Another good summary of the shift between the two plays is a change in metaphors. Summer has an off-stage but much-discussed casino, where characters can go to unleash their baser natures. Eccentricities does away with the casino, offering instead an unseen Musée Mécanique, a mysterious collection of odds and ends that really defies any sense of logic. Alma’s mother, played here by the fabulous Jane Moore, almost stopped the show on opening night with her sensational monologue about it.

 

At the Bethany Mission Gallery, which itself is a collection of droll and delightful Americana, Eccentricities is truly a cabinet of curiosities. One in particular changes the focus here, and although I’d like to be gallant, it needs to be mentioned. Alma and John are generally played by actors in their 30s or early 40s. Brock and Zak are considerably older than that.

 

For me, although it alters the underlying dynamic of their relationship, the aging-up actually sharpens the play. Love as seen here is physical, certainly; but it’s also a cushion against loneliness and the sheer brute force of life. That has rarely registered so poignantly.

 

Another major theme also comes through loud and clear. Williams, with supreme irony, called his fictional Mississippi town “Glorious Hill,” but it’s closer to a hive or a snake pit. Small-minded pettiness lurks around every corner.

 

Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium has long made a specialty of absurdist theater; Eccentricities is not in that category, but Brock—who also directs here, with real verve—has applied a strong dose of comic vigor to the lives of the town people, culminating in a hilarious at-home salon where the rigid, self-righteous townsfolk express outrage over the poetry of William Blake (“Insane! Insane! The man was a mad fanatic!”).  Whether Williams wanted something quite this heightened is debatable. Some will probably object that it’s too much. But I’d say it doesn’t matter. The gang at IRC makes it work.

 

In addition to the performances by Brock, Moore, and Zak—all of whom should jump to the top of next year’s Barrymore lists—there’s some fine supporting by the ensemble.

 

Eccentricities is, to be sure, an odd play. This is a delightful but idiosyncratic production. Trust me, though—when Tina Brock takes to the stage, brilliance is never far away.

 

Eccentricities of a Nightingale plays through September 23. For more information, visit the Philadelphia Fringe 2018 website.

 

Read more at https://www.phillymag.com/ticket/2018/09/07/review-eccentricities-nightingale-brilliant-cabinet-curiosities/#1y88zLP2qFhBhGiw.99

 

Phindie 

The Eccentricities of a Nightingale

by Toby Zinman 

September 7, 2018 

 

Part of the pleasure of the Fringe Festival for me lies in the peculiarity and particularity of the venues, that inspired matching of play to place. IRC’s gorgeous and exciting production of Tennessee Williams’s THE ECCENTRICITIES OF A NIGHTINGALE is brilliantly located in The Bethany Mission Gallery, a private museum crammed with outsider art. Everywhere you look is evidence of eccentricities. 

 

It’s worth noting (and rejoicing in) producing artistic director Tina Brock’s decision to choose a play outside the classic absurdist canon, a canon that Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium has been mining for many years. Williams’s play fits the absurdist spirit if not the absurdist structure, and opens the notion of absurdity to the wide world of narrative plays about the absurdist nature of our lives. Much to look forward to.

 

ECCENTRICITIES is lush, loquacious and very typical Williams: lonely, sex-starved women, men struggling against overbearing mothers, desperation everywhere. We’re in Glorious Hill, Mississippi, and Miss Alma (the superb Tina Brock in a knockout performance) is the town’s oddball old maid; she feeds the birds, she makes extravagant gestures, she teaches singing: as she puts it she is “guilty of gilding the lily.” Daughter of the Reverend (Thomas Dura) and the unhinged Grace (Jane Moore), she is in love with John Buchanan, Jr (the excellent Jon Zak), a physician  who comes home for the holidays—July 4th, then Christmas, then New Year’s Eve. His mother (Carol Florence) represents everything Williams feared and despised: the judgmental rich who live life by smug standards, a world of people who are intolerant and cruel.

 

The cast is rounded out with a bunch of suitably eccentric-looking actors, playing a variety of roles and instruments, although the most revealing is Miss Alma’s literary club where they “discuss” (Brock says this with a thick Southern accent and a dollop of self-mockery): Bob Schmidt, Kassy Bradford, Jimmy Guckin, and Carlos Forbes.

 

That both Brock and Zak are older than the expected age of the central characters makes their situation all the more painful—a twenty-year old might escape the Williams doom (although consider The Glass Menagerie’s Laura, for one of many examples whose need to be saved by her Gentleman Caller is a study in hopelessness)—but a fifty-year-old, still fluttering and rampaging is in a circumstance far more dire (consider A Streetcar Named Desire’s Blanche du Bois). Although the show’s coda is not clearly enough staged to make its sad and shocking point, we do see, as Miss Alma sees, that “The only thing to do with a cross is to bear it.”

 

[Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortiium at the Bethany Mission Gallery, 1527 Brandywine Street] September 4-23, 2018; IdiopathicRidiculopathyConsortium.org

 

The Broad Street Review

The Eccentricities of a Nightingale

These Eccentricities Fit Right In

by Cameron Kelsall 

September 7, 2018

 

The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium (IRC) applies their well-honed absurdist aesthetic to Tennessee Williams’s The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, and it fits like a glove. Rarely has this odd and endearing little play — a late-career variant of the better known and oft-produced Summer and Smoke — sung so sweetly.

 

Credit for much of the production’s success belongs to Tina Brock, doing yeoman’s work as director, co-designer (with Erica Hoelscher, who also did the costumes), and leading lady. Her work is superlative across the board, though she deserves special praise for rendering the quirky, gothic-infused fictional town of Glorious Hill, Mississippi, with such panache.

 

Capturing the currents

 

Williams intimately understood the mechanisms of small Delta towns like Glorious Hill, where surface-level respectability cloaks a barely hidden seediness. He also knew they contained an array of characters chafing against the roles assigned them by society — because he had been one of them. He infuses Alma Winemiller (Brock), the play’s brilliant and troubled heroine, with equal parts irascible spirit and unending anxiety.

 

Brock grounds her performance in this duality. Her Alma often seems to perform the nervous behavior her neighbors expect of her, whirling around the village square in fits of excitement, courting the other townsfolk to look at her. She knows her place in this world — singing teacher, minister’s daughter, rapidly aging spinster — and allows herself to play it.

 

But there are moments in Brock’s performance that suggest Alma’s deep psychological dread is no act. These mostly come through encounters with Dr. John Buchanan (John Zak, doing wonderful, intricately detailed work), literally the boy next door, for whom she’s pined all her life. When she invites her would-be beau to a literary salon at her father’s rectory, she flutters with endearing nervousness. When she later bursts into his parlor complaining of heart palpitations, the gasping fear in her voice chills.

 

Both Brock and Zak are older than usual for their roles, and the casting choice pays dividends. Rather than seeming a rakish playboy, John comes across here as a cautious and compassionate man who knows his own mind, and knows what he wants. (It’s not Alma). Williams’s revision smartly excises Rosa Gonzales, the Mexican girl John impulsively takes up with to get away from Alma, a character too mired in stereotype for modern comfort.

 

An aged-up Alma gives a greater sense of the sacrifices she’s made to fulfill her duties, both to her own family and to a Southern culture that unfairly expects conformity and feminine perfection from women. Brock also shows the anger that underpins it. She’s keenly aware of her years spent watching the parade pass her by, and she knows that John’s rejection signals the end of a certain kind of hope. It also makes Alma’s decision, in the play’s final scene, to traverse the boundaries imposed on her all the more thrilling.

 

Phenomenal work extends into the supporting cast, with particularly strong contributions from Jane Moore (as Alma’s hysterically febrile mother, another woman likely lost to the demands of polite society) and Carol Florence (as Mrs. Buchanan, who observes that “every woman is a tiger when her son’s happiness is threatened”). Kassy Bradford, Jimmy Guckin, Carlos Forbes, and Bob Schmidt fill out a host of small roles with great verve; they also provide engaging musical interludes during transitions. Only Tomas Dura, as Rev. Winemiller, seems unsteady in his characterization.

 

For the second year in a row, IRC is ensconced in the Bethany Mission Gallery, a shrine to American outsider art. Amidst walls festooned with incongruous oddities, Brock and her fabulous team give voice to Williams’s ultimate outsider.

 

WHYY - Shapiro on Theater 

The Eccentricities of a Nightingale

by Howard Shapiro 

September 14, 2018 

 

Tennessee Williams was revising his 1948 play “Summer and Smoke” when he turned the reworked script into a new play: “The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.” He didn’t even bother to change some of the characters’ names and they even have the same back stories. Yet “The Eccentricities of a Nightingale“ is its own distinct work. It’s not performed much these days, which is too bad — the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium makes a great case for seeing it in the company’s first show of the season, part of the Fringe.

 

This is an airy, often sweet and very funny rendition of Williams’ tightly constructed play, performed in a large room with a cathedral ceiling at Bethany Mission Gallery, which houses the private collection of artifacts and outsider art of Center City attorney-businessman Victor Keen and his wife, dancer-choreographer Jeanne Ruddy. Artistic pieces sit on many shelves and hang from the ceiling, and give the play’s setting, Glorious Hill, Mississippi, an ethereal atmosphere.

 

Tina Brock, Idiopathic’s artistic chief, directs the play and also plays Alma, the leading character. Brock is just right as this excitable young woman, tethered to her little town, her minister dad (Tomas Dura), and mentally troubled mom (Jane Moore). The show plays out on three spaces. The cast uses the gallery portals to enter and exit, and long carpets to traverse the playing spaces. The production runs like a well-maintained farm — nothing’s wasted.

 

Alma is desperate to nuzzle with the guy next door (John Zak in a thoughtful, nuanced performance). He’s a newly minted doctor and a reluctant mama’s boy, squished under his mother’s thumb. With phony reasoning she pulls him away from Alma whenever he’s near; why should her boy go out with an unpromising teacher who feeds pigeons in the park and sings far too expressively at church and public gatherings? (Carol Florence plays the mother with such authoritarian rigidity and understated fury, she scared me.)

 

The play contains many themes that define Williams’ work: delusion, isolation, rejection, a slow descent into the abyss. But it’s inherently funny, and Brock offers up a garrulous Alma — the eccentric nightingale of the title — who’s also strikingly human with her fears, desires and ultimately, pragmatism. We’re on her side all the way.

_

“The Eccentricities of a Nightingale,” produced by the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, runs through Sept. 23 at Bethany Mission Gallery, 1527 Brandywine St. The Philly Fringe Festival runs through Sept. 23. For more information: fringearts.com.

 

Phindie (#2 review) 

ECCENTRICITIES and random notes on Tennessee Williams

by Kathryn Osenlund 

September 14, 2018

 

I enjoyed IRC’s  crisp and affecting production of THE ECCENTRICITIES OF A NIGHTINGALE, which has been reviewed on Phindie. I have brief, assorted thoughts to share on the subject. Like how this play’s mix of classic Tennessee Williams ingredients includes troublesome mothers, a less than eager gentleman caller, and most importantly, a poor thing. Eccentricities’ Alma Winemiller echoes other nervous and fragile women: Laura Wingfield and Blanche Dubois, also Hannah Jelkes (Night of the Iguana), Catharine (Suddenly Last Summer), and Marguerite (Camino Real). 

 

Alma Winemiller (Tina Brock was born for this role) is a bit different. Along with her charming awkwardness she is loud—and nervous and fragile. The whole cast for IRC’s production is particularly well chosen.

 

It’s interesting that Tennessee Williams believed he had a heart condition, although he did not have one. He must have allayed his worries by bestowing his fears on his creations— characters who either have, imagine, or claim to have heart problems. Alma is numbered among these, along with Candy, the drag queen in AndTell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens, Kilroy in Camino Real, the Reverend in You Touched Me!, Sebastian (only according to his mother) in Suddenly Last Summer, in addition to other characters in his prose stories.

 

Incidentally, young Tom Williams hung out with my boyfriend’s father’s family in St. Louis. He was good friends with my boyfriend’s aunt. Later he named characters in several plays after her. One Thanksgiving when he was staying with the family, the house was full, and at night there were not enough beds to go around. The young people had to double up. Tennessee Williams slept with my boyfriend’s father. I love saying that at a party. Of course, it wasn’t like that.

 

(The ticket to IRC’s Eccentricities includes access to The Bethany Mission Gallery, which is not open to the public. I can’t stress enough what a rare chance this is to wander around Victor Keen’s private collection of unusual pictures and paintings (Outsider Art), vintage radios and toasters, toys, and other curious stuff that’s truly something to see. It doubles the pleasure of your theater ticket.)