A review by bobbyknndy
The Eccentricities of a Nightingale by Tennessee Williams

1.0

Only read this if you're interested in seeing how Tennessee Williams's talent went way downhill as he aged, and for god's sake never perform it. This is a re-working of his 1948 play SUMMER AND SMOKE, and first performed as THE ECCENTRICITIES OF A NIGHTINGALE in the 1970s. Williams succeeds in cutting or retooling everything that made his earlier work so beautiful. Instead of a wonderful doomed love story between the main characters Alma (representing old-fashioned Southern gentility a la Blanche DuBois) and John (representing animal sexuality a la Stanley Kowalski), Williams emasculates John's role in the play and strips Alma of her Blanche-comparisons, leaving her just crazy instead of a woman of the wrong time. Always attractive to theatres, Williams does succeed in cutting the number of characters (including the two children), but it is impossible to read both this and SUMMER AND SMOKE and not bemoan the drastic reduction in quality.