While Tennessee Williams is acknowledged as a master, his later plays are theater’s answer to the madwoman in the attic: Producers and directors either ignore them entirely, or tread gingerly when forced to deal with them.
“The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore,” now in a new Roundabout revival starring Olympia Dukakis, is one of those ill-loved works. The central characters are Williams archetypes — a devouring older woman, her hypermasculine object of desire — and the morbid eroticism is hysterically overwrought.
It’s as if the playwright had gathered his favorite ingredients, jammed them into a microwave and pressed the “nuke” button.
Sadly, director Michael Wilson handled “Milk Train” with kid gloves — a sensitive approach that worked wonders with his staging of “The Orphans’ Home Cycle” but feels off the mark here.
Flora Goforth (Dukakis) is a rich widow holed up in an opulent compound on the Italian Riviera. Her diseased, deteriorating body propped up by booze and morphine, she spends her waning days dictating her memoirs to the secretary she calls Blackie (Maggie Lacey), mixing up past and present, reality and fantasy. Yet sick as she is, Mrs. Goforth can’t stop yearning for love.
“It’s the breath of life to me,” she tells Blackie, “what I need to be me.”
Lo and behold, a hunky gigolo, Christopher Flanders (Darren Pettie), shows up at her door. Turns out he’s accompanied so many elderly dowagers to the grave that he’s nicknamed the Angel of Death — a perfect last foil for Mrs. Goforth.
Partly inspired by Tallulah Bankhead — who once played the part on Broadway — Mrs. Goforth is a signature Williams grotesque: a flamboyant creature who’s strong and vulnerable, bitchy and pathetic. Dukakis bravely throws herself into the role but doesn’t convincingly suggest its larger-than-life charisma.
Nearly as outlandish a character is the Witch of Capri. It’s a part that’s been played by both men and women in the past, and Edward Hibbert takes it on now. Here the show flirts with classic camp, without fully embracing it.
That’s too bad, because camp’s ability to embrace both subversion and pathos may have helped: “Milk Train” is all about heightened extremes — the timid need not apply.