Theatre is a very different thing these days, of course, and there’s another chapter in what the Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis is doing this year. They’re giving us radio plays that we can pick up online either when they’re run on Classic 107.3 FM on alternating Saturdays at 5 p.m. or later via the TWSTL.org wegsite.
Hello From Bertha is the current offering, and it’s a stunner. One of the best of Williams’ short works – running time is about 25 minutes – it’s set in a brothel in East St. Louis during the Depression. Bertha, one of the women working there, is ill, indeed, very ill.
Director David Kaplan, who directed the play in 2016 as part of the first season of TWSTL, returns and utilizes the same cast. A wise move on his part, using Anita Jackson as Bertha, with Donna Weinsting as Goldie, who runs the house, and Maggie Winninger as Lena, another, younger resident of the establishment. Jackson is particularly fine, managing to create a picture of a woman in physical distress – one can almost see her heaving about in the bed – and emotional pain as well, not knowing and knowing how sick she is, thinking of a former lover now far away and married. Weinsting’s Goldie can see how sick Bertha is, and would like to get her off the premises and into a place where she can get some help. We’re not sure which takes priority, Weinsting balances things so well. Bertha is a little confused in the medical sense, forgetting things, refusing help, a little paranoid, and at one point calls to Lena, who’s very gentle with her but equally unable to satisfy everything wants.
It’s a difficult, poignant play, tightly written and focused. It won an award from a small theater in New York in 1940, which led to Williams meeting Elia Kazan. Their mutual tendency to create controversial work led to several fruitful collaborations like A Streetcar Named Desire.
The link to Bertha is below, and it’s good until September 5. That evening at 5 is the online broadcast of the next in their series of short Williamns plays, Summer at the Lake.
But don’t, under any circumstances, miss this one.
Hello From Bertha
until September 4, 2020
Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis
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