Tennessee Williams' final play, A House is Not Meant to Stand, premiered in 1980 at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. Written as a short, it was later expanded by Williams into full-length form which he then tinkered with until his death in 1982, giving the work various titles, all of them cumbersome, especially the one that stuck.
A big, steaming chunk of cornpone comedy, the play takes place in Mississippi's Gulf Coast in a ramshackle house belonging to Cornelius and Bella McCorkle (Alan Blumenfeld and Sandy Martin). He's a blowhard, she's suffering from dementia; they have a deadbeat son, Charlie (Daniel Billet) who has a pregnant, Jesus-freak girlfriend (Virginia Newcomb).
Williams brings in other equally bizarre southern characters: Jessie and Emerson Sykes (Lisa Richards and Robert Craighead). They live nearby and are constantly feuding with the McCorkles, a la the Hatfields & the McCoys. Rounding out the cast are Chip Bent as a conniving policeman and Kevin High as an oddball doctor.
The play has very little story; Williams strings together a series of speeches (some of them aimed directly at the audience) in a desperate attempt to provide drama and urgency. Many of the speeches deal with a pot of money Bella has supposedly hidden away somewhere. Bella herself can't stop babbling about the light of her life, her recently deceased transvestite son Chip.
Williams saw the ruined, leaking McCorkle house -- and its seedy, grasping characters -- as a metaphor for the breakdown of contemporary American society. But he has gone over the top with his satire; all the characters in A House Not Meant to Stand are grotesque caricatures, and his director has made things worse by instructing the actors to shout their lines in one-note, headache-inducing fashion.
Unfortunately, the Fountain has picked one of Williams' worst plays to honor the late playwright's 100th birthday.
