To a Mountaintop

The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, by Tennessee Williams, is his first unequivocally symbolic and undeviatingly religious allegory. It will certainly repel devotees of realism. It will equally certainly make Hermione Baddeley the most envied actress on the island of Manhattan, since she has been given another of the playwright's memorable roles for women, Flora Goforth, whom she portrays with blinding blistering brilliance. Playgoers inured to the calculated trivia of Broadway may be infuriated, touched to the quick, or turned stone-deaf at being asked, in all seriousness, to contemplate the state of their souls at the moment of impending death.

This is the condition of Flora Goforth, who must meet not her publisher's deadlines, as she likes to think, but her Maker's, as in her terror-gnawed bones she knows. Flora is a vulgar, bawdy, explosive clown in her 60s, an eternal show girl, who has buried six husbands and who, fingers warty with jewels, is still desperately, greedily, and somehow gallantly grabbing at life in a mountaintop villa in Italy. Indeed, she has three villas, pink, blue and white, all wired up in a walkie-talkie intercom system into which she dictates at all hours of the day and night what she ludicrously conceives to be Proustian memoirs of the international set. Up a goat's path to the Goforth domain staggers a starving, exhausted poet in Lederhosen named Christopher Flanders (Paul Roebling), who clearly hopes to stay on for free. Craftily suspicious of freeloaders, Flora keeps the handsome young man at one villa's distance while she rifles his field pack to learn that he is 34 and constructs mobiles. A witchy visitor of Flora's vintage, Vera Ridgeway Condotti (Mildred Dunnock), warns her that Chris has been nicknamed "Angel of Death," having been the questionable companion of several old ladies at the time of their demise. Bent on one last fleshly fling, Flora decides to seduce Chris.

A strange contest ensues, in which she barters for his body and he gambles to save her soul. On the surface, Milk Train is Flora's story and incontestably Hermione Baddeley's vehicle. She can put the chill of mortality into a sibilant whisper, all vanity into a grandiose Churchillian lisp, all lechery into a creamy smirk. As she coughs, groans and rages about the stage, she is larger than death.

But on subsurface tracks of meaning, Milk Train speeds toward a surprisingly different destination: an allegory of the temptation of Christ. As Boston Drama Critic George E. Ryan of The Pilot perceptively noted during the pre-Broadway tryouts, Chris is both St. Christopher and a Christ figure. Christopher means Christ-bearer. Chris arrives at Flora Goforth's burdened with a pack so weighty that he stumbles. In legend, St. Christopher carries a child across a river, and suddenly, finding the weight almost too great to bear, discovers that he is carrying Jesus, who in turn bears the sins of the world.

The Goforth villa is on the Divina Costiera, the Divine Coast, and Chris arrives hungry and asks for milk, "the best thing to break a fast with." Later, Chris drinks and dribbles milk down his shirt front, a metaphorical baptism in this symbol of purity and childlike innocence. He has not eaten for three days, and "after four days an unfed stomach gives up hope and stops hurting." For credibility, Williams thus reduces by tens Christ's Biblical fast in the wilderness "being forty days tempted of the devil. And in those days he did eat nothing: and when they were ended he afterward hungered."

As Christ was tempted on a mountaintop, so is Chris. The temptress is Vera, who promises to promote him as an artist and lay the wealth and social aristocracy of Capri at his feet. Chris is said to have "worked a miracle" in enabling an old woman with a broken hip to walk again, and during the play he banishes the heartsick depression of Flora's prim widowed secretary (Ann Williams) with an open-handed touch. At one point when Chris speaks of leaving for Sicily, Flora taunts him with "Can you walk on water?"

Flora represents both a natural--a floral--vitality and the corruption of the world. Her memoirs are a lengthy confession of sin in that symbolically worldliest of all worlds, the international set. Near play's end, when Flora cries out at the pitch of anguish, "Bring God to me! . . . how do you do it, whistle, ring a bell for him?" she frantically tinkles a little dinner bell three times, the triply rung bell in the celebration of the Mass that heralds the presence of Christ in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Flora's final hope is that she is about to be redeemed for her sins. But since Chris is 34, the action of the play takes place after the crucifixion of Christ; hence the sense of loss implied in the title.

There is too much pagan Apollo, too many reminiscences of other narcissistic young Williams heroes placidly contemplating their torsos to make Williams' vision of the Christus acceptable to most playgoers, though Paul Roebling plays him more than acceptably, as does Mildred Dunnock the role of the she-devil.

As Flora's lovely, put-upon secretary, Ann Williams somehow suggests that she has locked her emotions in a vault to which no one, including herself, possesses the combination. Director Herbert Machiz shows an unobtrusive command of the metaphysical strife between good and evil that dominates Williams' vision of existence. A play so visibly ambitious was perhaps bound to be visibly faulty. The intercom between the surface narrative and the allegory intermittently goes dead. Flora Goforth is securely dramatized, while the Christ-bearer lacks spiritual intensity. Though Williams uses sparer and less poetic language than usual, it still lacks the stark candor of his subject. Nonetheless, the play has the aura not of a Broadway showshop failure but of a playwright-in-transition seeking, through a dark theme, amid mystical distortions, for the still and burning faith to paint a dramatist's 20th century El Greco.

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