It’s gotten to the point with the barebones Oakland Theater Project that everything the company touches, whether it’s a classic or an experimental new play, is golden in one way or another.
In the case of its current production, one of Tennessee Williams’ later dramas, “Orpheus Descending” (titled “The Fugitive Kind” in a 1960 film starring Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani), two elements stand out: superlative acting and a certain amount of surrealism, which director Will Detlefsen knows that Williams wanted.
Some of that surrealism is easily enough achieved; performing, as the company usually does, in a storage area in what was formerly Flax Art Supply, this time there’s no attempt to re-create the elaborate set design that Williams describes. Designer Sam Fehr rigged up some minimal suggestions in that regard.
Instead, the players perform on a strip down the middle of the room, with audience members seated on two sides opposite each other. Old paint cans and supplies remain on shelves from the Flax days. The stage lights spill over the audience. With a story this electrifying and acting this good —and a little bit of narration to describe what we’re meant to imagine — it almost feels like too much scenery would have been a distraction.
“Orpheus” is set in a gossipy Southern town, where tightly wound Lady runs a small dry goods store and cares for her very sick husband. Lisa Ramirez, the company’s co-artistic director, seems born to play Lady. Her frantic emotional journey over the course of the play is never less than riveting. Even her touch of an Italian accent, the tension in her body, is just right.
When a sexy, soft-spoken traveler of the fugitive kind, Val (Hunter Bryant, whose face simply radiates innocence), shows up in a snakeskin jacket, carrying a guitar and looking for work, it’s inevitable that fireworks between the two will eventually erupt.
Various peripheral characters carry almost equal weight to the main characters. There’s the town’s wild free spirit, Carol (Natalie Pasquinelli, achingly needy in the role); its visionary artist, Vee (an intense, pitch-perfect Susannah Martin); two gossips (Lizzie Izyumin and Zolboo Namkhaidorj, a perfectly tuned, snarky Greek chorus of sorts); and Lady’s sick husband (Robert Parsons, alarmingly nasty). The actors bring the kind of depth to their roles (and some play multiple roles) that surely Williams must have envisioned when writing about these lonely, trapped Southerners.
It’s easy to get caught up in the larger-than-life emotions of these characters, but a few directorial missteps do register.
When, early on, a character fiddles around with a cell phone, we’re put on notice that this production is set in an imaginary time zone—but there are no other meaningful directorial efforts to emphasize that.
More problematic: Val is meant to play his cherished guitar and sing—but the actor clearly is not a guitarist nor does he treat the guitar like the treasured object it’s meant to be; on opening night, he slammed it down on a table several times, never held it with reverence or care.
Still, despite these and a few other minor missteps, the players, the dialogue and story rise to the top, as is de rigueur for OTP.
Oakland Theater Project’s “Orpheus Descending” continues through Aug. 23 at 1501 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Oakland. Tickets are $10-$70 at oaklandtheaterproject.org.
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