‘CONFESSIONS’ : TELLING TALES ON TENNESSEE

Ray Stricklyn, materializing as Tennessee Williams in “Confessions of a Nightingale” at the Pasadena Playhouse, creates a bedeviled, tragicomic figure that represents a quintessentially happy theatrical union: an actor finding the role of his life.

Stricklyn’s one-man show is nothing so meager as an impersonation--although Williams’ soft, drawling speech, giggle and mannerisms are in full flower here. Rather, Stricklyn scores a sublime achievement: He brings the audience truth in the warm disguise of illusion. And that is precisely what Williams attempted to do in all his plays.

The production’s source material, culled primarily from interviews Williams gave writer Charlotte Chandler for her book “The Ultimate Seduction,” was no problem. No American playwright ever went so public as did Williams in the last two troubled decades of his life.

Williams’ flair for self-dramatization, of course, is both a curse and a boon for Stricklyn. How do you play a Williams who publicly parodied Williams? Another challenge is that Williams, the poet of the dispossessed, the shy exhibitionist, is so near to us. (He died four years ago, at 71, from choking on a medicine bottle cap, of all things.)

Recent one-man theatrical impersonations, such as those of Twain, Truman, Teddy Roosevelt, Will Rogers, at least share the comfort of quasi-mythic distance.

But Stricklyn, who originated “Confessions of a Nightingale” two years ago at the Beverly Hills Playhouse and performed it to acclaim last fall Off Broadway, peels Williams to the core because (1) Williams’ own profligate candor invites it and (2) Stricklyn’s identity with his subject is especially sensitive and submerged. Dressed casually in a white suit, an open-collared blue shirt and canvas loafers, Stricklyn relaxes in a king-sized rattan chair, sips from a carafe of white wine and flashes a smile like a burned-out Mississippi River boat gambler. A giddy laugh breaks into a light cackle. It’s Williams’ rhythm, his disguised tension, his loneliness.

We hear Williams, despite several references to Blanche DuBois, describe talk about his work as too personal to discuss. But talk about his private life (his aborted teen-age infatuations with real-life Betty and Hazel, “the snake pit years” of the ‘60s, the death of his dear friend Frank Merlo) and certainly anecdotes about his homosexuality come easy. “I can’t stand orgies. I even get embarrassed with one person in the room.”

The play, 90 minutes long, is not a holograph. It’s a jaunty conversation, a survivor’s determined “insatiable hunger for recognition that I still exist.” Finally, it’s a relationship (after death) established between a great dramatist and his audience.

Performances at 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena, run tonight through Sunday. (818) 356-7529.