Theatre Review: Glimpses of His Greatness

His Greatness, one of the most highly anticipated shows this season, opened last week at the Granville Island Stage. A new work by celebrated Canadian playwright Daniel McIvor, it tells the "potentially true story" of two days the American playwright Tennessee Williams spent holed up in his room at the Hotel Vancouver for the premiere of his play, the poorly-received The Red Devil Battery Sign. The details that remain of his time in our city are legendary - really, the stuff great plays are made of (check out this Globe piece for some of the facts). His Greatness distills this experience into McIvor's rendering of Williams (Allan Gray), his gay assistant/former lover (David Marr), and the young hustler hired to keep Williams entertained (Charles Christien Gallant).

Sounds riveting, right? A legendary playwright who was an even more legendary character, grasping at the last straws of his former glory, gasping for some sort of rebirth? I mean, really, what could go wrong?

A lot. A lot could go wrong, and frustratingly, a lot did.

Williams lived a life of great tragedy, subsumed in his final years by alcohol, drugs, and his lifelong fear of mental illness. His story contains everything one needs to create a play with the potential to reach the same Gothic heights as some of his best works - A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie. Of course, not everyone can write a Tennessee Williams play. For that, well, you need talent.

And I'm not saying Daniel McIvor doesn't have it. Having seen one of his previous plays (Never Swim Alone, a frenetically poetic piece that took Best of Fringe when it debuted in NYC), I have full faith in his ability as a playwright. So I really don't know what happened here.

All of the actors are well-trained, and I saw Marr and Gallant producing some wonderful work this summer in the R&J/Shrew duo at Bard. They imbue the stage with a very vibrant energy; however, all play their roles in broad strokes verging on caricature rather than the carefully rendered characters needed to give depth to the relationships.

The production values are high, the lighting delicate and beautiful, the costumes vividly appropriate. Now, I'll admit to being distinctly prejudiced against grandeur in theatre (and if you say this is due to the fact that I have no money to make the theatre I'd like to be making, well, you're probably right). But - and feel free to call me crazy - I'd rather see the story of a dark, tormented writer in a dark, tormented space. I'd rather a haggard Williams bent despairingly over his typewriter than a flamboyant, free-wheeling Williams cavorting across his hotel room a la Nathan Lane in The Birdcage. It's not to say he didn't have both sides, but Gray's slips into the tragic were too few and far between to paint a nuanced picture of a man barely balanced on the tightrope of sanity. McIvor does a disservice to his own talent and to Williams' life by paring this troubled man down to the comic and clownish, full of one-liners rather than shattered eloquence.

And here's a wild question: What is this play ABOUT? A man tumbling from greatness? The constantly disintegrating strings that hold together human relationships? Tennesse Williams may have unintentionally opened up his life to even more potent plot turns than he himself could have imagined. It's a pity McIvor chose the easiest one.

Photo Courtesy of The Arts Club Theatre Company.