Bent to the Flame: A Night with Tennessee Williams

Description
**** [FOUR STARS] Tennessee Williams never met Hart Crane; the gay American poet killed himself two years before Williams discovered his introspective verse. But the two volumes that Crane penned in his short life left an indelible mark on the great Southern playwright. In "Bent to the Flame"--set in 1945, as Williams prepares for an informal lecture he’s to deliver on Crane--star and author Doug Tompos draws upon Williams’s public persona in the wake of his early Broadway success, exploring the seesaws of love and fear inherent to homosexuality before gay liberation. Tompos effortlessly captures the mania of Williams’s obsession with Crane’s poetic elucidations as well as with the tortured essence of the man himself (a depression Williams was all too familiar with). This one-man show is occasionally maudlin, and does have other weak points; the cliché of the moth and flame is overworked, and Tompos can’t resist the urge to pun on Crane's first name. But the performer's wry, gossipy portrayal of Williams enlivens what might otherwise have been an esoteric lecture on early-20th-century poetics. In the play's finer moments, we gain insight into Blanche DuBois of "A Streetcar Named Desire"; in its lighter moments, Tompos calls to mind a breathier Blanche--one who lived in Miami with three roommates and an excellently appointed lanai.--Dan Lopez, Finance Clerk