A mandate of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival is to explore all aspects of the playwright including staging new works inspired by his short stories and poetry. It was in this spirit of invention that we settled in for an evening of cabaret at the Crown and Anchor.
Not far into the amateurish The Liberation of Colette Simple, however, our patience was soon exhausted. While Nathalie Carrington remained in character as the ditzy Miss Colette Simple, her partner, Adam Byron, assumed a number of different roles including (this was initially less than obvious) a canary. In the tradition of the English Music Hall, which Brits find more entertaining than we in the Colonies, they enacted a number of skits. This was managed with quick changes of costumes and the generous use of props. To convey a female character, for example, Byron doffed a hat with a fringe of feminine length hair, and flopped on a frumpy dress stuffed with breasts. It was less than convincing other than on terms of the broadest farce. At some point, the petunias of the Williams story came cascading down from above the stage. She scooped them up in her arms and walked about singing all the while. Most of all the lighting proved to be downright annoying. The following spot rarely landed where it was intended. Too often it was illuminating a vacant area of the stage several feet off target. Not that it much mattered or the attempts to solve just who stomped on her petunias. He, wearing pants and boots caked in mud, confessed. So the “crime” was solved it seemed as she launched into histrionic mode mopping the stage to end the show. We were astonished to see sporadic Standing O's from the audience. I remarked on this when comparing notes with our actor friends from Albany. “It’s a festival,” he said. “Everyone gets a standing ovation.”
You got that right.
