Review: Maggie Siff Makes Orpheus Descending Worth a Trip to the Underworld

It’s risky work dusting off one of the more flawed pieces by a playwright we typically regard as artistically bullet proof. The alluring reward, however, is the opportunity to bare the less familiar contours of writers whose biggest hits get comfortably warmed over and consumed without a lick of energizing friction.

Anne Kauffman’s inspired revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s overstuffed The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window has been the latest gold standard, successfully displaying the breadth of Hansberry’s artistic curiosities beyond the racial politics of her old chestnut A Raisin in the Sun. With that fruitful resurrection fresh in the minds of many New York theatergoers, Theatre for a New Audience is trying its hand at an off-Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’s rarely produced Orpheus Descending — the Southern playwright’s attempt at modern American mythologizing.

From its heavy-handed poetry to its confused metaphors, the problems that plagued Orpheus Descending back in 1957 (and its earlier incarnation as Battle of Angels) remain on display in this new production. It should surprise no one that there are tangible reasons why Orpheus Descending is not mentioned in the same breath as The Glass Menagerie or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But where director Erica Schmidt disappoints in this ambitious project is her failure to make a strong case for why this ungainly tale is still worth contemplating.

The best argument in defense of TFANA’s Orpheus Descending turns out to be the marvelous Maggie Siff. She stars as Lady Torrance, an aging Italian woman trapped in Two Rivers County, Mississippi, whom we meet years after her father, an immigrant bootlegger, made the fatal mistake of serving Black men in the heart of the Jim Crow South. His loss leaves Lady to marry the older (and now-ailing) Jabe Torrance (Michael Cullen) and run his general store, which hosts all the local busybodies (Molly Kate Babos and Laura Heisler open the show as local gossips Dolly and Beulah). In typical Williams fashion, we’re dropped into Lady’s world of suffocating loneliness and despair, eased for a tragically brief moment by a beautiful stranger — a wandering musician in a snakeskin jacket named Valentine Xavier (Pico Alexander is magnetic from start to finish as this mysterious interloper).

If chemistry could carry a play, Orpheus Descending would be set with Siff and Alexander’s steamy rapport (lighting designer David Weiner appropriately sets a mood of gothic romance in their most intimate scenes). Particularly after we get through the slogging exposition of Act 1, the accelerating relationship between Lady and Val — a woman whose funereal black wardrobe calls out for renewed life (costumes by Jennifer Moeller) and a young man who is a vessel of vitality — is an enticing engine for a clunky but eventful Act 2. However, save for the few moments Val takes to his guitar, his role as a modern-day Orpheus who has come to save his Eurydice from the pits of hell is lost in an aesthetically ambiguous world that has yet to commit to either realism or mythology.

Amy Rubin’s rendering of the Torrance Mercantile Store lacks the stifling feel of Hades’ underworld — due in equal part to the awkwardly utilized space that flanks the two-story unit set, and Schmidt’s haphazard direction that has mundane naturalism interrupted by otherworldly characters who clumsily slide in and out. The most tonally jarring of these visitors include an overwrought and over-costumed Carol Cutrere (Julia McDermott), a flirtatious outcast who knew Val in his snakeskin days; a Conjure Man named Uncle Pleasant (Dathan B. Williams), whom Carol joins in his Choctaw cries (a mildly uncomfortable mode of referencing yet another people displaced by American violence and hubris); and a perpetually blinded artist-prophet named Vee (Ana Reeder lending an uneasy comedy to her confounding character).

Christian, Indigenous, and mythological iconography are all thrown into the kitchen sink of Orpheus Descending — a muddy stew of imagery and symbolism that needs a clear-eyed vision to pull it out of the mire. When Siff finally explodes with transcendent liberation in the play’s final climactic moments, it’s as if she’s simultaneously liberating herself from the aimless maze of the past two-and-a-half hours and fashioning a discerning mythology all her own. It may not be the production we’ve been watching, but it’s certainly the one I prefer.