The Gnädiges Fräulein
by Tennessee Williams
Second Stage at The Adrienne Theater
March 17 - April 3, 2010
Directed by Tina Brock
Director
Tina Brock
Costume Design
Brian Strachan
Lighting Design
Joshua Schulman
Set Design
Lisi Stoessel
Sound Design
Tina Brock
Technical Director
Bob Schmidt
Stage Manager/Board Operator
Jesse Delaney
Assistant Set Designer
Emma Ferguson
Assistant Costumer
Rob Paluso
Cutter/Draper
Rufus Cottman
Cocaloony Head Piece Draper
Melanie Miles Stanton
Wig Designers
Rob Paluso, and Melanie Miles Stanton
Costume Construction
Cassie Eckermann, Stephen Smith and Angela Guthmiller
Photography
Johanna Austin / AustinArt.org
Presented by arrangement with Dramatists Play Service, Inc., on behalf of The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee
This production is made possible by a generous grant from The Philadelphia Cultural Fund.
The IRC is a 501C3 non-profit corporation.
The IRC participates in the Barrymore Awards Honoring Excellence in Theater.
Playing time is 65 minutes; there will be no intermission.
Reviews
The Gnadiges Fraulein by Tennessee Williams (2010)
"The overall effect creates a world so bizarre that if the show lasted more than 65 minutes, I would’ve needed a road map to return to reality."
Jim Rutter, Broad Street Review
"...the accomplished cast goes at it full-tilt."
David Fox, Stage Magazine
Director's Notes
March, 2010
Greetings and welcome to Cocaloony Key, “…a little bit of heaven dropped from the sky one day.”
The Gnädiges Fräulein, written in 1965, is translated from German as "The Gracious Lady” and marked a startling departure in the work of Tennessee Williams. It debuted on Broadway at the Longacre Theatre on February 22, 1966 as part of a double-bill of one-act plays written by Williams titled Slapstick Tragedy (the other being The Mutilated.)
On first read, many images came to mind – the Wizard of OZ, the Carol Burnett show, Warner Brothers Roadrunner cartoons, films by Tim Burton (and David Lynch), I Love Lucy. With that conglomeration of genres and ideas in tow, we set out to uncover the island of Cocaloony Key. The process provided many laughs, hours of interesting discussion and conjured memories of childhood fishing trips with my brothers.
The books and articles devoted to the merits and shortcomings of Gnadiges are far more in number than actual productions of the play itself. The lively discussion on the play’s merits that accompanied its debut led me to investigate further. Allean Hale of The Provincetown Theatre Festival writes, “(many researchers) saw Gnadiges as an allegory on the tragicomic subject of human existence….the play defies description…it seems autobiographical, for the Fraulein’s declining career is a fantasy version of the playwright’s own. The text can interpreted as Williams’ disillusioned view of the Theatre, with Molly as producer/director, Polly as the media, and Indian Joe as Hollywood, exploiting sex-as-commerce, and the Fraulein as the Artist under attack by the critics--the Cocaloonies.
Looking ahead to September 2010 and the upcoming Philadelphia Live Arts and Fringe Festival, the IRC will serve up The Empire Builders by Boris Vian, French novelist and playwright, jazz connoisseur and critic, Dixieland trumpeter and composer of more than 400 songs. As a writer, Vian's collected works amount to more than 50 volumes. Vian is best remembered for his novels L'écume des jours (1947), adapted for film with the strange English title Spray of the Days (1968), directed by Charles Belmont. This work was also adapted for the opera (1981) by Russian composer Edison Denisov. J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946), (I Spit on Your Graves), was another of Vian’s writings that garnered attention; Vian died in a Parisian cinema at age 39 while watching a preview of the film adaptation of I Spit on Your Graves.
The Empire Builders (Les Bâtisseurs d'Empire ou le Schmurz, 1959) follows the antics of a family whose new apartment is invaded by a terrifying noise. First staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962, and then in New York in 1968, look for the IRC’s production of The Empire Builders this September at Walnut Street Theater Studio 5.
Thanks for helping us excavate these seldom-seen works. Your support, through ticket sales and tax-deductible contributions, keeps our tiny IRC island afloat. We are most appreciative, and hope you’ll pass along the word to a few good friends.
For now, thanks for sharing your time with us.
Tina Brock
Artistic Director
March 23, 2010
The Broad Street Review
Southern comfort, taken to extremes
by Jim Rutter
In a reductio ad absurdum, you treat your opponent’s premises seriously, while pointing out that his conclusions necessarily lead to an absurd, illogical or impossible situation. Suppose, for example, you’re arguing with someone who believes that we should terminate genetically imperfect babies. The reductio would show that since no fetus possesses a perfect genetic code, it’s OK to abort all babies, a line of argument that no one would endorse.
In literature and film, reductios often appear in satire or parody, as in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 or Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. In both cases, the author takes the bureaucracy’s views at face value and then reduces them to the absurd situations they entail.
Tennessee Williams employs a similar approach in The Gnädiges Fräulein, an absurd exaggeration of island life in “the southernmost point of Terra Firma.” Here, the local gossip columnist Polly (Kelly Vrooman) pens the “southernmost write-up of the southernmost gangbang” in between lectures to the Audubon Society on the cocaloony bird, a creature that swoops down on the set with a Hitchcockian terror of cawing crows and the scream of a single-engine airplane.
Old vaudeville stunt
Today Polly can be found digging up dirt at “the big dormitory” boarding house under “the rooftop of God,” a place where “the dark angel checks the residents’ dog tags” at night. The residents include a Permanent Transient named Molly (Leah Walton), a perfume-spraying, blonde-pigtailed male-Pocahontas named Indian Joe, and the titular Gnädiges Fräulein (Jane Moore), a washed-up vaudeville performer who formerly entertained the crowned heads of Europe by catching fish in her mouth.
The Fräulein now pays the rent by outcompeting cocaloony birds for throwaway fish at the docks. At the start of the play, the birds (represented by Lee Pucklis, in a Sesame-Street nightmare of a costume) have already poked out one of her eyes. Undaunted, the Fraulein ventures out again under Indian Joe’s protection.
Preening gentility
“Absurd” barely begins to describe the surreal sense this production evokes. Throughout, Molly and Polly spout outlandish dialogue with mannered preening that overdrafts the bankrupt account of Southern gentility. While straddling orgasmic rocking chairs “in tune with the absolute infinite,” the pair listen to the Fraulein express the inexpressible in the “the best stage soliloquy since Hamlet.” Later, they tune in to see Indian Joe battle the giant bird with a hatchet.
The three actresses deliver this drivel with unabashed shamelessness. Walton’s Molly staggers about with a crimped posture and utters every syllable with an exquisitely slutty growl, Vrooman caps her big-grinned game-show hostess preening with the explosive rendering of a single word (“moo”), and Moore lines up like a horse at the starting gate in her ridiculous eagerness to run after the fish. I only wish these depraved caricatures really did exist, if only to continue laughing at them.
Under Tina Brock’s equally indulgent direction, one preposterous situation tumbles downhill into the next, and why not? To put the characters’ actions in the context of a plot would give too much credence to their lives (not to mention ruin the spoof). The overall effect creates a world so bizarre that if the show lasted more than 65 minutes, I would’ve needed a road map to return to reality.
The boundaries of realism
What does it mean? I can’t tell you— as I could, say, for Heller or Kubrick. The script teems with potential autobiographical references (Williams lived in Key West and was blind in one eye when he wrote it), and some critics have perceived analogies to the commercial production of art.
But who cares? The Gnädiges Fräulein stands at the boundaries of the same psychological realism that Williams’s early plays (like The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire) helped to cement as central to American theater. Once in a while, we need a play like Gnädiges to remind us of that even psychological realism needs safe borders.
March 20, 2010
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Easy to see why it’s rare
Little else is understandable in this Tennessee Williams one-act from 1966.
by Toby Zinman
The Gnadiges Fraulein ("the Gracious Lady") is a short, odd Tennessee Williams play being given a rare production by the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium — with perhaps too much emphasis on the ridiculopathy.
This one-act offering is a far cry from the passionate plays Williams is famous for (The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) in both style and substance. Poor, heartbreaking Tennessee had pretty much hit the skids by 1966, the year of The Gnadiges Fraulein, although he would keep on writing until his death 17 years later.
Director Tina Brock's commitment to theater of the absurd has provided local audiences with many rare gems, but this grotesque, sad vaudeville does neither the script nor the audience — nor the three strong lead actors — any favors.
An attempt at a plot summary: On a remote island called Cocaloony Key, Molly (Leah Walton) runs a dilapidated boardinghouse in which the Gnadiges Fraulein (Jane Moore) is the preeminent boarder. After a run-in with gigantic dive-bombing birds, the cocaloonies, Polly (Kelly Vrooman), who writes the gossip column for the local newspaper, arrives looking for a story. They rock themselves to orgasm on the porch chairs. They talk in loud voices, in broad countrified Southern accents. The G.F., who supports herself by catching fish in her mouth, appears dressed in lilac tulle and bleeding profusely. A cocaloony has poked one of her eyes out. She sings. We hear the story of her glory days in showbiz, then her failure, after which she "just drifted and drifted and drifted. ... She lost her sense of reality, and she drifted."
Sound familiar? Poor old self-aware Tennessee, writing poetic laments for a one-eyed G.F. who is his stand-in. There are a few walk-on roles — a blue-eyed Indian, a gigantic bird, some old guy — but the women carry the show, although where they carry it to is anybody's guess. The play is probably an allegory of the playwright's career, and might be, despite its goofy dialogue, moving and interesting if the production were not so strident and insistent on slapstick (although, to be fair, it was originally part of a double bill called Slapstick Tragedy).
Ah, well. To quote one of the characters, "All of us sally forth once too often." Both IRC and Tennessee should have stayed at home this time.
Mar 23, 2010
The Philadelphia City Paper
Miss Halfway: The Gnadiges Fraulein
by David Anthony Fox
I am an unapologetic collector of Tennessee Williams' oddities — and they don't come any odder than The Gnadiges Fraulein, a one-act play that opened and abruptly closed in February 1966 under a fusillade of critical abuse. Many dismissed the play as an incoherent freak show. My attempt at a brief synopsis probably won't convince you otherwise: On a desolate island — the southernmost among the Florida Keys — a small group of people are buffeted by winds and assaulted by large birds that are attracted by the stench of dead fish, but stay on to nibble at the human residents. The latter include Polly, a bitchy gossip columnist; Molly, a bitchy hoteliere; and the title character (it roughly translates as "gracious lady"), an old vaudeville performer who has lost one eye and most of her wits, though she still can warble through a repertoire of dated songs and run out periodically to retrieve a fish. (There's also a hunky blond Indian.)
But don't dismiss TGF completely. True, there's not much narrative clarity. But Williams was always as much symbolist as realist. And if you consider the play as a dark satire — on the playwright's own dwindling reputation, and the nasty delight of theater critics who build up careers only to tear them down — you'll find it full of rapier insights. Williams may have lost his gift for structural control, but his dry wit and poignant, poetic reveries are here in abundance.
The trouble is, the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium's production doesn't give The Gnädiges Fräulein even a fighting chance. The play is a comedy of sorts — but it's a black comedy, full of violence. Here, director Tina Brock goes for the broadest kind of rural farce, in shades of Green Acres. It's very skillful in its way, and the accomplished cast goes at it full-tilt. But the amusement it provides (if this is the sort of thing that makes you laugh) doesn't do poor Tennessee's script any favors. I wish I could encounter Jane Moore's performance of the title role in other circumstances — she's a sensational actress, and alone in the company finds some sweet-sadness that cuts to the heart and makes us realize there's actually something going on here.