Do I wake or sleep?

Ha! I finally figured out how to use that userpic factory so as to make an icon of my beloved home state. Take THAT, Technology!

Michael and I saw Eccentricities of a Nightingale on Monday night. It's a (heavily) revised version of my favorite Tennessee Williams play, Summer and Smoke, about the somewhat eccentric daughter of an Episcopal priest in Glorious Hill, Mississippi around 1916. Alma is such a lovely, delicate creature, with Blanche's romanticism and love for the half-light but without her annoying qualities :) (Blanche gets on my nerves sometimes.) She has a line in the original, a quotation of Oscar Wilde's: "We are all of us lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking up at the stars." She's such a pure idealist, her yearning so strong--I love how she refuses to indulge John's summer of dissolution. John is the doctor's son (and newly minted doctor himself) who lives next door--she has been in love with him since she was a child.

In the original, the action starts in the summer and mostly takes place there. Johnny has just graduated from Johns Hopkins with honors but has no interest in applying himself; he only wants to gamble, drink, hang out. He and Alma have some pretty strongly worded discussions about the soul versus the physical and he makes a clumsy pass at her on the one date they attempt. Later in the fall, she tells him she's changed her mind ("Last summer I was suffocating in smoke, from somethin' on fire inside me...") and he says even if she'd let him before, he wouldn't have been able to--he wouldn't have felt worthy. She has a beautiful line, something about "so you've come around to my way of thinking, just as I have to yours, two people exchanging a call on each other at the same time, and each one finding the other one gone out, the door locked against him, and no one to answer the bell." Oh, it breaks my heart. He ends up engaged to one of her voice students, and she? As Johnny says to her teasingly earlier in the play "Miss Alma is lonely..." and the last we see of her, she is picking up a traveling salesman and about to hit the redlight district with all her brittle charm on display.

Eccentricities of a Nightingale changes the stories and characters considerably--Johnny in particular is much less interesting. He's much more of a mama's boy--they have this weird more-than-faintly Oedipal relationship that diminishes him quite a bit. Alma is muuuuuch more eccentric (some of it was the actor), not an improvement. She's so weird that frankly you wonder what he sees in her!--she needs to have some sweetness to attract him, and us. She's much less vulnerable. Alma's mother's cruelty has been transferred to her father. And most of the action takes place during the Christmas/New Year's season, instead of in the summer. This means one of my favorite exchanges is lost--when Alma has retreated into the rectory after the summer's failure and her father asks plaintively "what am I to say to people who ask about you?" and she replies "tell them I've changed and you're waiting to see in what way."