A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur
Certainly the elements are here for a great Williams play: dreams, dashed hopes, neurosis, and vulgar reality with all its disappointing compromises. Williams’s setting, in the working-class squalor of south Saint Louis, is reminiscent of the downwardly mobile neighborhoods of The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. And the characters in A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur remind us of Williams’s earlier, better conceived heroines. Like Laura in The Glass Menagerie, Dotty–the fading rose at the center of this story–lives in a dream, passively waiting for a knight in shining armor we know will never come. And like Blanche DuBois in Streetcar, Dotty has been devastated by a long-ago love affair that went wrong.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Cecilie D. Keenan’s graceless staging exaggerates everything that’s weak in the play. The hour-long first act takes forever. Williams’s prosaic, leaden dialogue never reaches the lyrical heights of Streetcar or Sweet Bird of Youth or even the middling heights of The Eccentricities of a Nightingale. Yet Keenan has her actors deliver these lines as if each and every one were a literary pearl. They seem to feel that they need only speak Williams’s flaccid dialogue and keep from tripping over the furniture, and the result will be a brilliant play. It isn’t brilliant. In fact, with the exception of one remarkable five-minute scene at the end of the second act, it isn’t even alive.
