[NEohioPAL] Review of "Two by Tennessee" at Karamu

[Bob Abelman]

Karamu’s ‘Two by Tennessee’ misses its mark



Bob Abelman

Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal

  

When we hear the name Tennessee Williams, our thoughts gravitate toward his award-winning classics “The Glass Menagerie,” “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”  But the playwright’s talents were first recognized in his one-act plays.



Though Williams rarely wrote in verse, all of his one-acts are remarkably poetic in style and structure.  He had a gift for being able to compress the raw intensity of life and the depth of the outcasts living it – particularly the lonely and the lost – into one small, sobering scene infused with rich, lyrical dialogue.  



This is particularly evident in the short-form plays that share the bill “Two by Tennessee” at Karamu House, where the outcasts in question are young girls who have lost their innocence at the hands of their trusted protectors. Both plays were written in 1946 and take place in Mississippi during the Great Depression.  Both depict sin as omnipresent, sex as joyless, and happy endings as the stuff of other playwrights’ one-acts.  



And the staging of both miss their marks in the hands of director Latecia Delores Wilson, whose artistic choices turn the plays’ poetry into something pedestrian.



For more of this article, go to www.clevelandjewishnews.com/columnists/bob_abelman/


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