This is Tennessee Williams as you’ve never seen him. The play he wrote in 1941 just before his first success, The Glass Menagerie, is a wacky, surrealistic farce.
Both plays share a protagonist who is rebellious against conventionality and looking for a change of scenery — very much like Williams himself. But Menagerie is serious drama, whereas Stairs to the Roof is a fantasy. He never wrote anything else like it, and Stairs in the Roof apparently has never before been staged in the Philadelphia or New York area.
The opening scene shows employees at the Consolidated Shirt Company robotically going through automated office routines at typewriters and file cabinets. It reminds us of Elmer Rice’s 1923 play, The Adding Machine, which attacked conformity and also had surrealistic scenes, as Stairs does. It’s clear that Williams was paying homage to Rice’s creation.
You will recall that Williams was employed by the International Shoe Company in St. Louis, and the fledgling playwright searched to find a voice that would proclaim his sympathy with working people. His main character reflects Williams’s earnest idealism at that point.
That character, named Benjamin Murphy, complains that the air in the office is as thick as molasses. He gags at the relentless tedium, rebels against industrial America’s slavery to the clock, and attempts to escape the cage that he feels he’s in. During lunch hour he ascends stairs from the 16th-floor office up to a roof where he finds a wider view and a chance for freedom. He goes on a capricious adventure that involves liberating foxes in the zoo and romancing a woman who is not his wife.
The play is full of vivid, purplish prose that surely is not expected to be played straight. Here’s where the stylized physical movements, for which Savadove and his company are known, transform the script into sparkling entertainment. As the players often move in slow motion, showing amazing virtuosity of movement and gesture, they communicate the mechanism of office work. Physical gestures are purposely broad, played for laughs. The scenery is intentionally askew and off-kilter.
The large cast includes excellent new additions to the professional theater community. Especially striking are Craig O’Brien as Ben, Lauren Berman as The Girl, Christopher Marlowe Roche as the mysterious Mister E (mystery), plus Dana Orange, Matthew Weil and Michael Pliskin. Dane Eissler contributed significant work as associate director.
