THEATER REVIEW : ‘Confessions’ of Williams the Survivor

Last June, when actress Debra Mooney was at the Old Globe Theatre performing in Tennessee Williams’ “The Night of the Iguana,” she talked about the playwright who had praised her college performance in his “A Streetcar Named Desire” and remained her friend until his death four years ago at age 73.

All of Williams’ characters have something in common, she said. They are all facets of one personality: his.

“He was a man with the most marvelous sense of humor about himself, about life, about his plays,” Mooney recalled. “He never gave up on anybody. . . . He himself was a survivor.”

This is the Williams that comes across in Ray Stricklyn’s “Confessions of a Nightingale,” an irresistibly charismatic one-man show about the playwright, at the Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre through Sunday.

Written by Charlotte Chandler and Stricklyn and based on the lengthy conversations with the playwright that appear in Chandler’s book “The Ultimate Seduction,” the show spends little time feeling sorry for the man. That is how it should be.

Critics have dwelled too much on the fact that Williams had written his most significant plays more than 20 years before he died. What they forget is that those years alone are enough to earn him dramatic immortality.

In that time, he created the desperate, fading Blanche du Bois in “A Streetcar Named Desire”; frightened, fragile Laura Wingfield in “A Glass Menagerie”; anxious Miss Alma, hyperventilating with love for Dr. Johnny in “Summer and Smoke”; and, of course, the fighters who will not let go of life, Maxine in “The Night of the Iguana” and Maggie in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

Different as these characters are, what they have in common is that they are struggling to survive--whether on the brutal terms of the world as it is, or on their own terms of escape into a world of faded finery and photograph albums.

The structure of “Confessions,” such as it is, consists of an evening with the playwright. Stricklyn, who won an L. A. Drama Critics Circle award for best actor two years ago for this show, brings this conceit off seamlessly, becoming one with the humor, passions, fear and hopes of the man being portrayed.

Sitting in a big, old-fashioned Southern chair, with an old typewriter on a desk on one side and a trunk on the other, Stricklyn navigates his way through Williams’ life on a liter of white wine and an aureole of smoke from his pack of Kool cigarettes.

In so doing, he creates a decidedly complex organism. Stricklyn’s Williams is a name-dropper, easy with reminiscences of Tallulah Bankhead, Marlon Brando, Greta Garbo. But, just when you begin to wonder if the show was designed as a thin binder to keep gossip column anecdotes together, he reveals that his love of trivia is a way of diverting people from that which is most personal--his work. And, when it comes down to it, the person he admired most was not one of the glitterati, but Frank, his lover of 14 years, who was taken from him by lung cancer.

Stricklyn’s Williams never understands why he wasn’t able to re-create his earlier successes. The narrative itself, however, implies that the loss of his lover and the attendant loneliness, depression, and drug and alcohol abuse affected his ability to infuse himself and his characters with the hope that once kept him and them from defeat.

Mooney said that, even though Williams wrote about Blanche being packed off to the sanitarium by her brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski, he confided to Mooney: “Of course, she didn’t stay there.”

It was this sense of indomitability, of going down with all flags flying, that is missing from Williams’ later work. As Stricklyn weaves his magic, carrying the audience effortlessly from the trivial details that make up a life to the depths that challenge, rattle and sustain it, it becomes clear that the quintessential Tennessee Williams character was the great man himself, raving and writing until the bitter end, when he suffocated alone on the cap of a bottle of pills.

It is fitting that this final Williams character should have a play all its own. And what a worthy and touching one this is.

“CONFESSIONS OF A NIGHTINGALE”

By Charlotte Chandler and Ray Stricklyn. With Ray Stricklyn. At 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday with a Sunday matinee at 2. At the Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre, 444 4th Ave., San Diego.