Exploration is the fodder of Five by Tenn and Tom Crean — Antarctic Explorer. “Dragon Country, the country of pain” is Tennessee Williams’s Terra Nova, and it’s afforded a tender and ghostly trek in Five by Tenn (presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company at the Calderwood Pavilion through February 25). The concept isn’t new: in 2003, Hartford Stage offered 8 by Tenn, a two-part program of Williams one-acts that found the lyrical poet/playwright walking in the shoes of Ionesco and Beckett. In 2004, Michael Kahn directed a Five by Tenn at Washington’s Kennedy Center that included works newly unearthed by scholars Nick Moschovakis and David Roessel while doing research for the 2002 edition of Williams’s Collected Poems. For SpeakEasy, director Scott Edmiston uses three of those plays, substitutes two others, and adds a scene from the 1977 Vieux Carré to trace an arc of Williams’s development as both artist and sexual being that devolves into his wandering mostly forsaken in the desert of his later career. In one work, the cryptic I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow (radically reconceived by Edmiston), the poet’s frightened youthful and older selves come together. As George Orwell might say, some of these works are more equal than others, but the way in which Edmiston threads them together is exquisite. And given the quality of the cast, somewhat ought to commandeer his Rolodex.
Williams asserted that his single theme was “the destructive impact of society on the sensitive, non-conformist individual.” Here we have sketches that take weightier shape as The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, with their wounded and delicate birds of pretense, commingled with more caustic experimental works that bespeak the despair of the diminished if still idealistic writer haunted by the passage of time. But whereas Kahn’s production glued its one-acts together by means of a Williams impersonator, SpeakEasy offers the soulful Eric Rubbe as the young writer, clinging to his innocence even as he surrenders it in These Are the Stairs You Got To Watch and Vieux Carré, and the sublime William Young as a forgotten poet renouncing rediscovery in Mister Paradise. In the evening’s most moving work (and the only one besides Vieux Carré to have been seen before), the Pinteresque I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow, the two stand-ins come together in a piece conceived by Williams for a middle-aged man and woman but here re-envisioned for interdependent, lonely men — fearful May and urgent December — and enacted with fragmented desperation by Rubbe and magisterial crankiness, then an æthereal dying light, by Young.
The evening begins with an expertly antic staging of the 1940s These Are the Stairs You Got To Watch, which is set in a cinematic den of iniquity beckoning an under-age usher. That’s followed by a Glass Menagerie warm-up and Chekhov homage, the 1937 Summer at the Lake, in which the Williams stand-in does not skedaddle into long distance but swims into the blue yonder — though not before remarking of the fire escapes of Williams’s blighted St. Louis youth: “Don’t they think people have things to escape besides fire?” The play’s Amanda figure is well acted by Trinity Rep stalwart Anne Scurria, with a mix of faux gentility and true grit, and Mary Klug tops her addled-factotum turn in Stairs with a subversively subservient one as an elderly, put-upon maid.
Those two glimpses of sensitive youth give way to a scene from Vieux Carré, which is based on Williams’s early-1930s awakening in the New Orleans neighborhood of the title. Edmiston says he wanted to include the vignette, in which Rubbe plays the Writer to the predatory yet companionable tubercular artist of Will McGarrahan, because it marked Williams’s first depiction of sexual intimacy between men. But Vieux Carré was first only in the sense that it was produced. Around 1960 the author had written the other showpiece of Five by Tenn, And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens, which while leading up to its punch-line variation on Richard II tells the Blanche DuBois–esque tale of Candy Delaney, a New Orleans decorator who likes to bring home rough trade and dress up in drag with, predictably, violent results. An outwardly one-note-belligerent Christopher Brophy telegraphs the brute sailor’s inward confusion, and the excellent Allyn Burrows proves a dapper yet feminine Candy.
Irish explorer Tom Crean was not just a cool customer but a cold customer, bellying up to the bar of Antarctic adventure not once but three times. And he tells all about it in Irish-born writer/performer Aidan Dooley’s engaging one-man show Tom Crean — Antarctic Explorer (presented by Súgán Theatre Company at the Boston Center for the Arts through February 11). Suiting up in wind-breaking Burberrys beneath a beach ball of a moon and a hovering sledge, Dooley suggests the Annascaul publican that Crean became after surviving two attempts on the Pole with Robert Falcon Scott and one with Ernest Shackleton. Vigorous and a little sly, Dooley’s Crean acknowledges the audience from first to last, serving up a pair of harrowing adventures as if they were bar nuts. Freeze-dried bar nuts.
