TWO SIDES OF WILLIAMS SERVED UP IN ‘TENNESSEE’

Tennessee Williams talked and wrote so much about his personal life that any play about him cannot contain much in the way of surprise.

To be special, a biographical drama must capture Williams’ theatricality and his poetic lyricism. Ray Stricklyn’s earlier Tennessee portrayal, “Confessions of a Nightingale,” had the right color, and now we have another Tennessee rose--more faded and wilted but also more thorny.

“Tennessee in the Summer,” a Southern California premiere at the International City Theater in Long Beach, dramatizes conflicting male and female aspects of Williams by using two actors. Playwright Joe Besecker has physically split Williams in two, and director Shashin Desai has deftly staged the self-confrontations.

The result is a treacherous gamble that is often a hoot but never frivolous. For instance, at one point an assertive and brash Bonnie Pemberton as Williams’ female psyche spots a male hustler outside “her” window. To the consternation of Milt Tarver as the male Williams, working hard at his typewriter, the hunk is invited up and into bed.

Such split focus oversimplifies the entangled nature of duality. But the device works as an impressionistic blueprint of Williams’ plays (and, by extension, the Blanche DuBois/Stanley Kowalski axis).

Tarver is wrenching in an alcoholic haze, pathetically eating dinner off the floor after it was dumped there by Williams’ anguished real-life companion Frank Merlo. Elsewhere, dark, rangy Pemberton in her white silk slip throws her bones over Williams’ bed with defiance.

You absorb the hothouse humidity of Williams’ final years. And Tarver enjoys an uncanny resemblance to the playwright, who looked like a gambler on the Delta Queen.

Two supporting actors mercurially segue through triple roles--Brian O’Halloran is Williams’ brother Dakin, Merlo, and the obligatory hustler. Alison MacHale is Williams’ mother, a nurse, and the playwright’s fragile sister, Rose. They are all well-defined portraits.

A wispy, tattered, shuttered and coppery interior serves the play’s various times and locations, artfully rendered by designer Peter Gruber and lit by Paulie Jenkins.

Performances are in the northeast corner of the Long Beach City College Campus, 4901 E. Carson St. , Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7:30 p.m.; through Nov. 8. Tickets: $8; (213) 420-4275.

‘SOME SWEET DAY’

There’s nothing like a funeral to hurtle together disparate members of a family. In the black domestic drama “Some Sweet Day,” by playwright Nancy Fales Garrett, mourning is followed by tension, travail and melodrama.

Abundant life flowers on a South Carolina farm in this production of A Director’s Theater at the Lex--sisters scurry in the kitchen, cousins snarl on the front porch, a chic white wife (Kate Stern) fights back tears, her self-satisfied, upscale black husband (Leonard Thomas) cheats on her. Urban and rural values clash, the farm goes up for sale, the family’s aging survivor (Ian Foxx) winks and takes private calls from a lady friend. That’s the half of it.

The director is Claude Purdy (who directed “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center). He deliciously forges a family’s benumbed hurly-burly when the characters return home all in black from grandmother’s services, but never quite paces the chaos with rhythms that coalesce.

Nor can the estimable acting talent (led by Fran Bennett, Peggy Hutcheron, and Hawthorne James) overcome playwright Garrett’s fuzzy focus. It is irritating, for example, to still be pondering in the second act who is related to whom.

The concluding (offstage) tragedy is abrupt and unconvincing.

Stern as the white New York wife is stuck with a thankless and unrelentingly down-at-the-mouth role. Virgil Woodfork’s nicely-angled set suggests offstage roads and fields but needs more interior scruff.

Performances at 6760 Lexington Ave. are Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 and 7:30 p.m.; through Nov. 21. Tickets: $10-$12, (213) 465-0070.

‘SILO’

Capt. Norris wanted to be an Air Force pilot but had to settle for public relations. You are among “the distinguished visitors from Los Angeles privileged” to tour a Strategic Air Command base and hear the captain discourse on missiles and defense guidance systems, although he apologizes for the cramped basement and the absence of coffee (in Theatre/Theater’s Backstage).

“Silo,” written and performed solo by Bill Shick in a tight, 45-minute format, is a zany, oddly realistic personal Armageddon that nukes its target: defense preparedness and the programmed men in blue who purvey propaganda.

Shick’s captain has one problem--he’s a probable schizophrenic. Certainly he’s having a nervous breakdown, confusing deterrents with his estranged wife, alternating between domestic/career turmoil and flashes of military decorum. His quick, quirky drawings of airplanes and silos are hilarious.

Shick is a martial Everyman, a sandy-haired, uniformed nice guy turned embittered and crazed defense spokesman. It’s a rich portrait, like watching a teacher fall apart before your eyes until he gets a telephone call from the dean and briefly pulls himself together.

This is an experiment, directed like the wind by Grant Morgan, that gives performance art a fresh name. The wonder of it is that Shick slips you through the humor to the credulity of it all.

Performances at 1713 N. Cahuenga Blvd. conclude Tuesday and Wednesday, 8 p.m. Tickets: $5; (213) 87l-0210.

‘VATSLAV’

This sardonic political satire by Polish emigre playwright Slawomir Mrozek is a bizarre production--a Fellini-esque carnival freak show that, at least up to the intermission, manages to suggest the playwright’s scornful spirit.

In the second act, the production at Santa Monica’s Off Main Street Theater totally self-destructs into fatuity and leaves you gasping for the exit.

Mrozek’s chilling message (seen before in his savage “Tango”) is that intellectuals in the modern state lack the killer instinct to exercise power. Only the insensitive brutes and common opportunists are ruthless enough to do that.

Mrozek and Tennessee Williams share the same idea. This theme is noted for the record because you will barely find it on stage here. Directors Frederique Michel and Charles Duncombe are too busy playing circus. A striking turn, however, by Michael Shore in dual roles as a transvestite and a pony-tailed idealist/genius highlights the show. Actor Jack Obney’s entitled Everyman character and Nick Calamo’s Oedipus also carve lingering images.

Performances are at 208 Pier Ave. in Santa Monica, Thursdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., until Nov. 8. Tickets: $7.50-$12.50; (213) 399-8105.