'Kingdom of Earth' grounded by uneven acting

A young, virile Marlon Brando is, for most of us, Tennessee Williams' enduring legacy. And understandably so—in the 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire, Brando unequivocally defined Williams' male persona. Three years later, Williams wrote the short story Kingdom of Earth, also featuring a brutish male whose masculinity is irresistible to women. Whether or not Williams was trying to capitalize on his success or simply borrowed too heavily from himself, the story was not particularly well-regarded until decades later, when it was turned into a play. The Yale Repertory Theater is currently staging Kingdom of Earth, but whether it's the fault of the script and the acting—or more of Stanley's long shadow—the play seems dull and derivative.

The story is as follows: Lot (Joey Collins), dying of tuberculosis, brings his wife of a day back to his Mississippi Delta home in the face of an approaching flood. The wife, Myrtle (Cindy Katz), an aging showgirl once known as the "Petite Personality Kid," eventually chooses the macho and sharp-tongued Chicken (Jack Gwaltney), who's lived in the house while Lot has been gone, over her effeminate and refined husband. The two acts take place in a tilted three-room house, whose wooden frame extends past the catwalks of the New Theater at Holcombe T. Green, Jr. Hall. The house suits the confines of the "black box" theater, and its free-standing, complete structure impresses upon the audience the same uneasy feeling of relocation that Myrtle possesses.

The play begins with strange, electric Delta-blues guitar, which intermittently fades back in but unfortunately always serves as a reminder that you are sitting in a theater, and not in the Delta. The playbill also strains to situate you s o, with all its quotes from William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. Worst of all are the actors' accents, convincingly pulled off only by Lot, whose listing demeanor and slow delivery are the highlight of the production. Indeed, most of Chicken's and Myrtle's lines could have benefited from slower delivery and pauses before speaking, as if to show they are actually listening to each other—even if they don't, in typical tragic form, hear what the other is saying.

COURTESY YALE REPERTORY THEATER The flood waters approach as passion rise.

The dynamics between the characters take shape in the second act. Lot, who has thus far demonstrated the most acute perception and depth of character, sits silently by the window in his dead mother's room, as Chicken is then free to prey upon Myrtle's insecurities. Previously Lot commented to Myrtle, "You do not have a complex nature." She agreed, responding, "When I love, I don't hate." The audience has no reason to doubt that Myrtle is simple and one-dimensional, but when her submission to Chicken does suggest a greater complexity to her character, Katz's portrayal doesn't reflect it. Perhaps director Mark Rucker is choosing an interpretation of Williams that focuses on the dichotomy between outward appearance and internal strife, that Myrtle has deepened but doesn't show it—but it just comes off as unconvincing acting.

Gwaltney's portrayal of Chicken, as suggested earlier, seems overly influenced by Brando's Stanley. Chicken walks with a swagger and talks in similarly aggressive, choppy phrases, but his character is a mixture of machismo and a certain fallibility and timidity, and this is not demonstrated until the end of the play. When it is, however, it is done well, and it adds meaning to the characters' final realization that the physical love between a man and woman is strong enough to disregard all this world's problems.

In one of the best performed scenes of the play, Chicken grabs Myrtle's hand to stop it from shaking in fear. It does, and when she complains that it hurts her neck to sit in front of him while he stands up, he responds, "You don't have to look at my face; that's not all there is to me—not by a long shot." At this point, she begins to fellate him as the moonlight brightens on the dying Lot, who yells downstairs to ask why the lamplight just went out in the kitchen. Afterward Myrtle comments, "When instinct is natural, practice is not necessary."

It is sexual instinct that draws Myrtle from Lot to Chicken and saves her from the flood. This is an interesting reversal of the Sumerian myth upon which Tennessee Williams purports to model the story. In the myth, the goddess of love and fertility makes seven descents into the underworld, each time further and each time losing one of her protective faculties. She ends up naked and dead. One gets the impression that Williams is attempting to strip bare the protective layers we employ to insulate ourselves from all-consuming sexuality, and to somehow free us to it. But the uneven acting of this production obfuscates this seemingly straightforward point, whether valid or not.

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