La Jolla Playhouse’s ‘Sweet Bird’ Dips but Sometimes Soars

For his finale as La Jolla Playhouse artistic director, Michael Greif chose that mass of Gulf Coast humidity known as “Sweet Bird of Youth.” The 1959 Tennessee Williams drama, filmed in 1962 with original Broadway stars Paul Newman and Geraldine Page, pits steely gigolo Chance Wayne against crumpled, chemically addled movie star Alexandra Del Lago, traveling incognito as the Princess Kosmonopolis.

Williams based Princess on Tallulah Bankhead and Chance on who knows who all. (Some plays trade in variations on Everyman; Chance is an Everyprettyboy.) Around these self-described “monsters,” who obviously have seen “Sunset Boulevard” more than once, the playwright throws in Deep South racists and the threat of castration. As the play ends, that threat is about to be made good.

The late ‘50s found Williams working heavily in metaphoric mutilation mode. The snakeskin-jacketed hero of “Orpheus Descending” gets killed by chain-gang dogs. Sebastian, the troubled soul with the horrifying mother in “Suddenly Last Summer,” is devoured after consorting with “native” boys. This is not the stuff of gentle, poeticized realism--although, in virtually everything he wrote, Williams mitigated even his most overheated narrative devices with a true poet’s sense of language.

In the spirit of locating honesty amid excess, Greif has taken on “Sweet Bird of Youth.” In recent years, notably in England, major directors have revisited the second tier of the Williams canon. Plays such as “Orpheus Descending,” revived by Peter Hall, or more recently, the early melodrama “Not About Nightingales” staged by Trevor Nunn afford an irresistible challenge: how to find a truthful core amid such lurid trappings?

That challenge is met halfway in the uneven Playhouse revival.

Greif adds a prologue, scored with hot, nervous jazz, in which we see something the script refers to later: the castration of a black man. Greif adds other visual flashbacks on a panel behind and above the stage.

“Sweet Bird of Youth” begins with Chance (Patrick Wilson) and Princess (Pamela Payton-Wright) in a hotel suite. They’re about to engage in a bout of mutual blackmail. He wants her to help him in his acting career. She just wants him.

Chance has returned to St. Cloud, his hometown, in order to claim Heavenly (Elizabeth Reaser), daughter of the racist politico Boss Finley (M. Emmet Walsh). In the Boss’ beady eyes Chance wasn’t good enough for his daughter, once upon a time. Now, years later, he’s only less worthy.

Chance is like the gentleman caller of “The Glass Menagerie,” all rosy high school memories, with a few miles and a few dozen dames behind him. Princess is a trashed-out survivor, given to smoking hash and swigging vodka. “Get a little sweet music on the radio,” she orders at the end of Scene 1, “and come here to me and make me almost believe that we’re a pair of young lovers without any shame.”

About half the time, Payton-Wright is very fine as Princess. She’s effective in the confidential key, the bittersweet and introspective moments. In the comic-hysteric mode, however, she’s less convincing.

Wilson is first-rate throughout, less sympathetic than Newman was in the movie, but intriguingly callow. Veteran of a thousand movie and television roles, Walsh grouses and schemes and shambles through the Boss Finley role. He’s fun; he brings a history of scumbags to this scumbag. Doing double duty as local doctor George Scudder and, strikingly, as a heckler who acts Williams’ voice of conscience, William Youmans proves exceptional.

Mark Wendland’s scenery provides a big, open stage, dotted by a semitransparent screen depicting realistic sea gulls (strange, since the material cries out for abstraction, not realism). There’s real water onstage, a Greif trademark, adding to the Gulf Coast atmosphere.

This play’s nothing without atmosphere. But Greif only pushes it so far. He doesn’t really have the instinct for overheated trash. Like Payton-Wright, his production fares best in a confidential key, when it’s at once spare and performer-friendly.

That combination distinguished Greif’s work on two of his best Playhouse efforts, “Therese Raquin” and “Slavs!” as well as “Rent,” his biggest hit by a mile. “Sweet Bird of Youth” lands in the middle range of the the outgoing artistic director’s accomplishments. In that regard, it’s very much in line with the play itself, a middling hothouse unto itself.

* “Sweet Bird of Youth,” La Jolla Playhouse, Mandell Weiss Theatre, UC San Diego, North Torrey Pines Road at La Jolla Village Drive, La Jolla. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Nov. 14. $19-$39. (619) 550-1010. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes.

Patrick Wilson: Chance Wayne

Pamela Payton-Wright: The Princess Kosmonopolis

M. Emmet Walsh: Boss Finley

William Youmans: George Scudder/A Heckler

Don Harvey: Tom Jr.

Patricia Gebhard: Aunt Nonnie

Elizabeth Reaser: Heavenly

Susan Denaker: Miss Lucy

Dohn Norwood: Charles

Fred Harlow: Dan Hatcher

Written by Tennessee Williams. Directed by Michael Greif. Set by Mark Wendland. Costumes by Brandin Baron. Lighting by James F. Ingalls. Sound and music by Jeremy Grody. Production stage manager Steve Adler.