Theater: Culture Project / 45 Bleecker St, New York, New York, 10002
Synopsis:
With In Masks Outrageous and Austere, Tennessee Williams continues to explore the passionate obsessions that made him famous in the early masterworks --the impenetrability of the human heart, the futility and hypocrisy of denying or displacing physical attraction, the power of love and its tyranny--while employing the dramaturgical freedom and aesthetic daring he discovered in his later plays. And all of this he does with the provocative wit and lyricism that was his hallmark.
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April 16, 2012: Peering through her silver lorgnette, the martini-packing woman with the big jewelry is woozy with disorientation. “There’s certainly nothing familiar about this terrain,” says the woman, Babe, an aging heiress played by Shirley Knight in the murky stew of exotica called “In Masks Outrageous and Austere,” which opened on Monday night at the Culture Project.
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April 16, 2012: Too many shows these days are workshopped or focus-grouped to death. As a result, they’re nicely crafted but comfortably safe. “In Masks Outrageous and Austere” is the exact opposite.
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April 16, 2012: A kidnapped billionairess and her bisexual husband. Three gay centurions. A mystery woman who keeps her dimwitted son on a leash. And a blazing fire on the beach. They’re all part of the crazy mess that is Tennessee Williams’ final full-length play, “In Masks Outrageous and Austere.”
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April 17, 2012: When you sit through something as turgid, as ludicrous as In Masks Outrageous and Austere, Tennessee Williams's last play -- or so we're led to believe of a manuscript cobbled together by other peddler-meddlers, supposedly including a computer -- you spend much of the slow-moving time wondering whom the roiling cauldron of picked-over Williams obsessions serves. Among the groups, it definitely doesn't benefit are theater audiences.
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April 16, 2012: It's hard to know what to make of "In Masks Outrageous and Austere." Tennessee Williams' last full-length play was left uncompleted at the time of his death in 1983. Writer Gavin Lambert, a friend of the playwright who had been working as an unofficial dramaturge on the project, squirreled the manuscript away, not releasing it until 2005. In 2007 it was announced that Gore Vidal, who adapted several of Williams' works to the big screen and was a lifelong friend, would finish the work for a Broadway production, but those plans languished. Now director David Schweizer has compiled a playing script and given the show a fevered multimedia presentation. Starring veteran Williams actor Shirley Knight, "Masks" is a fascinating mess.
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