Stage:

...Carol Cutrere, whose weapons are defiance and her own iron-like frailty...

...Too marvelous for the production, perhaps, because nothing-not even the entrance of Redgrave as Lady-has the power of Shelton's monologue...

...Anne Twomey, as Carol, is amorphous-the actress, not the character-never conveying the strength and the isolation that I still feel when I conjure the final image of Lois Smith's Carol in the original production...

...Opinion seems to be divided in both these instances...

...The signal, aside from her lines, is that she removes the "Do not resuscitate" bracelet at the end of the play-a gesture that was not widely perceived-having decided, like Don Marquis's Mehitabel, that there's a dance in the old dame yet...

...Val, the itinerant guitarist whose defense, until he meets Lady, is to keep moving...

...The handsome movie star (how the camera caressed him in The Accidental Tourist) has made himself a little ugly (a walrus moustache) and a lot ungainly as Augie-Jake...

...The suggestion is that she has hurt herself by being too proud, and that realization sends her ghost-selves away and leaves her free to concentrate on the UPS man-a younger man-with whom she hopes to find a comforting twilight romance...

...Williams opens his play with "two female clowns," to borrow his description of similar figures in The Rose Tattoo, who turn exposition into a flamboyant set piece...

...and Lady, who schemes to turn her trap into triumph...

...I was left to contemplate how Hall's conception worked, what Redgrave did to Lady, and how the American actors fared in her company...

...This Orpheus Descending certainly recognizes what Williams wanted to say, but it is never demanding enough to compel me to listen...

...Alving in Ghosts, which I saw in London a few years ago-seems absorbed in her own anguish...

...Like Sweet Bird of Youth...

...Kevin Anderson is not the conventional stud figure once regularly cast in Williams plays, but his Val is the most interesting of the four fugitive kind...

...The performer seems to have taken her cue from Williams's description: "Her voice is often shrill and her body tense...

...These four characters, who circle one another, touching occasionally, never making real contact, need to provide the center of pain and the failed promise of hope so that the ending is properly frightening...

...There are four Williams outsiders in Orpheus Descending: Vee, the visionary painter who copes with Two River County by seeing beyond it...

...For me, the rest was anticlimax...

...He and Redgrave did the play in London at the end of 1988-the first production of the new commercial company he established when he stepped down as director of the National Theatre...

...The playwright, Joe Pintauro, may never have come across Arthur Laurente's A Clearing in the Woods (1957 like the original Orpheus), in which the heroine appears simultaneously at four different ages, but Laurente's device is the one that Pintauro uses...

...She does not talk to people, but in their vicinity, and the disconnection-even in the scenes with Val-is heightened by puppet-like movements, an awkwardness that is intended as a shield...

...Now he has brought the production, recast with American actors, to Broadway...

...Some theatergoers have been dazzled by a vision (like Vee Talbott in Orpheus...

...Sloane Shelton, who seems to understand, to feel every hesitation, every repetition, every intensification in Williams's words, is a marvelous Beulah...

...In a number of interviews Hall has repeated what he said in a piece in the Daily Telegraph at the time of the London production (reprinted in the October Playbill)-that Williams is a non-naturalistic playwright, that his verse is a poet's variation of the spoken language, and that Orpheus Descending is an unusual Williams play in that it "portrays the bigotry and racism of a whole community...

...In this production, Tammy Grimes-an odd choice for Vee-manages to suggest, physically not verbally, Vee's willful blindness to the horrors around her...

...This monologue should set the nonrealistic key for the whole production," Williams wrote, and Hall has followed his lead...

...Beulah gives the audience the preplay history of Lady Torrance and her "Wop" father while Dolly chimes in with single lines ("Lawd have mercy...

...This is true even when they are doing something more complicated, less self-aggrandizing than the usual star turns, which is certainly the case with Vanessa Redgrave in Orpheus Descending and William Hurt in Beside Herself...

...It is a fairly trying play-obvious, predictable, pedestrian-which is interesting only because Lois Smith gives a touch of irony to her character and because William Hurt plays the UPS man...

...Her Lady-like her Mrs...

...Redgrave's Lady Torrance vibrates at the center of Peter Hall's Orpheus Descending, a reading of Tennessee Williams's play that is probably more conventional than Hall thinks it is...

...Mary, apparently living alone in the woods on an island, is in fact living with herself at other ages (ten, twenty, thirty, or thereabouts), trying to find out where things have gone wrong in her life...

...Given this understanding of Williams and his play, Hall uses lights and sounds as offstage threats (as Williams's stage directions suggest) and fills the background with shadowy figures who hover as intrusions in even the most intimate scenes...

...that work not as interruptions but as support, like the cries of the congregation in an evangelical service, feeding the narrative build of Beulah's recollections of lust and violence...

...GERALD wealesRALD weales...

...More than that, his gestures (using precision to suggest imprecision), his way of listening, his occasional teasing of lines give Augie-Jake a depth-or at least the tantalizing promise of depth-which the playwright failed to do...

...Anyone tempted to go see how well Orpheus Descending withstands the artistry of Vanessa Redgrave and Peter Hall may also want to look in on Beside Herself to see how much William Hurt does with not very much...

...The trick with successful Williams productions is to use the nonrealistic elements, the overstated characters, what he once called his "cornpone melodrama," but to make sure that there are real toads in those imaginary gardens (pace, Marianne Moore), characters in whom we get glimpses of ourselves...

...The play that has brought William Hurt home to the Circle Repertory Company, where he performed regularly in the late 1970s and early 1980s, is a great deal simpler than Orpheus Descending...

...Her separateness is emphasized by her having chosen to play with an unnecessary Italian accent (Lady grew up in this Southern town) which sometimes sounds Irish and sometimes Zsa Zsa Gabor...

...Then, there is Redgrave's Lady...

...Still, audiences go to be astounded and, since astonishment is rare in the theater, often come away disappointed...

...others, like the man in the original shaggy-dog story, come away saying, "It wasn't so shaggy...

...While the forces of darkness defeat the life-bearers in the Williams play, the heroine of Beside Herself(hois Smith, thirty years after her Carol Cutrere), comes to terms with her past and decides to live as fully as possible...