AUGUST 21, 2011 ◆ PAGE 4

It was a full house at the Gardens Hotel for a dress rehearsal last Thursday night of three plays by Tennessee Williams. “Suddenly Last Summer” plus two shorter pieces bythe playwright whose 100th anniversary falls this year are being staged outdoors by Key West Fringe (formerly The People’s Theater of Key West) and can be seen tonight, Aug. 21, then on Friday through Sunday, Aug. 26 to 28, at 7:30 p.m. out-doors at the Gardens, 526 Angela St.

In our opinion, they are a triumph. Serving as the stage for the first two of the three plays, “Something Unspoken” and “The Lady of Larkspur Lotion,” is the bricked patio beneath the hotel’s second-story porch. After the inter-val, there’s a switcheroo and “Suddenly Last Summer” is staged on the patio while the audience is seated in the garden.

In “Something Outspoken,” Miss Cornelia Scott (Janeen Gracer) and her secretary/confidante of 15 years, Miss Grace Lancaster (Kristen Wilson) sit at a table with a single rose and a telephone. They avoid speaking about a matter that “makes the house shake with silence.” We never find out what that is but Tennessee Williams’ great loopy sentences, reeking with poetry and ornate bile (plus the occasional French) pull us along until we get it, that the “something unspoken” will ultimately create an unbreakable silence. Gracer is ideal as the grande dame and caused more than one audience member to recall their own maiden aunt. Wilson as the secretary is appropriately, and for- lornly, baffled by her.

“The Lady of Larkspur Lotion” is a laugh-out- loud piece of puffery set in boarding-house squalor, with Monnie King tragically grand as the tenant, Tammy Shanley fiercely loud as the landlady and P.J. King very funny indeed as “the second William Shakespeare,” a tenant who introduces himself as Chekhov. This little play speaks of “lies stuffed in the mouth by hard-knuck-led need” and is far funnier than that might suggest.

The last time we saw “Suddenly Last Summer” in Key West was at the Tennessee Williams Theater in 1994, with the late poet Danne Hughes as an overwrought nun. This production at the Gardens is of another order altogether. Perhaps it is the sultry garden setting, the audience cooling itself with fans (thoughtfully provided) and the cast mopping a collective brow from suppressed passion, that hauls the work so powerfully home. Williams’ shadows, in his own words, become “as luminous as the light.” Peggy Montgomery as Mrs. Venable sets the tone painfully and poetically, sharing how “I lost my son last summer.” Son Sebastian desired fame “after his death, when it couldn’t disturb him.” This was not a folie des grandeurs, insists Mrs. Venable. “It was grandeur.” Jessica Miano Kruel as Catherine, cousin of the late Sebastian, is extraordinary. This is one of the great roles in American theater and she manages it with an almost supernatural mix of grace and madness. The sodium pentathol episode (we presume that’s what the injection was), in which Catherine begins a confession of what really happened so suddenly last summer, is a roller-coaster ride in which “the easiest direction to run is down.” Down to — would you believe? — cannibalism, if Kruel more than meets the appalling challenge of her part. She has a serious future ahead of her. Very good, too, are Connie Gilbert as Miss Holly, Joanie Sullivan as the nun and Timothy Foster as big George. Lesser but important roles are well served by Melody Moore as Miss Foxhill and Hal Cosec as Dr. Curowicz

Director of all three plays is Steven Chambers, himself an actor and currently the literary manager at New Theater in Coral Gables. He knows what he’s doing and he does it well. His dress rehearsal went without a hitch, at once tight and trembling. This is by far the most mature offering from the actors and crew now calling themselves Key West Fringe. It is a portent of great things to come.

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