Another sign that society operates in circles has appeared in St. Louis. Eighty years ago, people listened to drama on the radio. That would be 1940 or so, the year Tennessee Williams’ play Battle of Angels was professionally produced in Boston. (It didn’t go over well.)
Nevertheless, Williams persevered. And so has the Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis in 2020, accepting the necessary cancellation of the year’s festival but bringing us instead a group of Williams’ short plays, not as podcasts but as actual radio broadcasts that can be listened to, after their premieres, streaming online.
Classic 107.3 is airing them at 5 p.m. every second Saturday through September 19. This past weekend, the second one, This Property Is Condemned, began. It will stream until August 7, and you can listen here . Elizabeth Teeter is Willie, a teenaged girl who’s been abandoned but is determined to make her way back to her fantasies, and Tony Merritt a boy named Tom who meets her along the railroad tracks of a Mississippi Delta town. This is not a budding romance – Willie’s eyes are not on the present at all and it’s not hard to see Tom “Tennessee” Williams in the boy who’s soaking up Willie’s story and saving it for telling decades later. Teeter gives us a Willie that’s very easy to picture in our minds, trying to grit it out in a town that’s not got a whole lot to offer. She’s trying very hard not to be fragile, as so many of Williams’ young women are. Merritt’s Tom is rightfully doubtful about much of all this, but properly too innocent to put the pieces together. Tim Ocel’s direction weaves the story together well, making the most of the 25 minutes or so that it runs. Henry Palkes’ music is darn near perfect.
After the 25 minutes, there’s a commentary from Tom Mitchell, a Williams scholar at the University of Illinois, who makes it perfectly clear (and rightly so) that this is only slightly related to the Natalie Wood/Robert Redford film of the same name. (Mary Badham, who played Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird is Willie and Jon Provost, who was Timmy in the “Lassie” series, is Tom, but they get short shrift in the film version.) That’s fine, but the pleasure here is in just being pulled into the combination of good acting and your own imagination.
This Property is Condemned
through August 7
Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis with more about the series
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