Summer of 1940

By Gerald Clarke

SOMETHING CLOUDY, SOMETHING CLEAR By Tennessee Williams

"The most raffish and fantastic crew that I have met yet and even I--excessively broadminded as I am--feel somewhat shocked by the goings-on." That was how Tennessee Williams described his Provincetown acquaintances in a letter to his friend, Novelist Donald Windham, in the summer of 1940. Now the playwright has returned to that scene. But somehow that raffish and fantastic crew has fled his memory, and the characters on the stage of Manhattan's Jean Cocteau Repertory would not shock a novitiate nun.

August, the Williams persona (Craig Smith), lives in a shack on the dunes, writing his first major play and trying to entangle Kip, a dancer and Nijinsky look-alike (Elton Cormier), in his grimy bedsheets. But both Kip and Clare (Dominique Cieri), who acts as his protector, are doomed, he by a brain tumor, she by diabetes. The entire work is shadowed by death, which is approaching as quickly as the fall. Both characters seem so tentative, however, that it is even hard to imagine that the end, when it occurs, will matter much to them or anyone else.

There are sparks from the Williams fire here and there; even when he is not in best form, Williams is never uninteresting. "How long are you going to go on working?" Clare asks August-Tennessee. "Until I die of exhaustion," he answers. Williams, 70, may be somewhat tired, but like Sophocles, who wrote his last play when he was nearly 90, he continues, on and on.-- By Gerald Clarke

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