“The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore,” currently being revived at the WPA Theatre, is Tennessee Williams’ play about a handsome young man who arrives mysteriously at an Italian villa and gets all the women there very excited. Set in 1962, it chiefly concerns Flora Goforth, an aging actress who has come to the Divina Costiera to write her memoirs. A former Follies girl who has lost six husbands, Mrs. Goforth—known as Sissy—is now dying herself, though of what is not entirely clear. (At times, such as when Mrs. Goforth has herself injected with morphine, it seems like cancer. At other times, such as when she coughs blood, it seems to be tuberculosis, though tuberculosis was not a big problem in 1962, as far as I know, so perhaps it is cancer after all.) Living with Mrs. Goforth and helping her to organize her life and loves is her personal secretary, Frances Black (known as Blackie) whom she alternately abuses and exploits. Also drifting in and out of the villa is Mrs. Goforth’s friend Vera Ridgeway Condotti, another wealthy, faded widow who is known, for no discernible reason, as the Witch of Capri.
Christopher Flanders, the new arrival, is the pivotal figure in the play. A jack-of-all-trades—part parasite, part visionary—he constructs mobiles, dabbles in literary translation, and travels around Europe making his home with rich women of advanced years. He’s also a poet, also an erstwhile ski instructor, though sadly out of shape, apparently; for winded by the long climb up to the villa, he falls asleep immediately on arrival and is put to bed. When Vera, a fierce gossip, tells Mrs. Goforth over drinks that night that Chris’s reputation as a companion to dying women has earned him the nickname the Angel of Death, she is horrified. The two women go in to ogle Chris, thinking him still asleep. On rising later, he describes the incident to Blackie, who, having taken a liking to the young man, goes to bed with him. The following day, Mrs. Goforth attempts to humiliate Chris, first by withholding food and then by offering herself to him. When he rebuffs her, Mrs. Goforth flies into a rage and sends him away. The play ends with Chris starting back down the mountain and Mrs. Goforth weakly imploring Blackie to bring him back.
The first Broadway production of “Milk Train” (with Hermione Baddeley in the role of Sissy Goforth) opened in January of 1963 and ran for sixty-nine performances. The following year, a revised version of the play opened on Broadway on New Year’s Day and closed four nights later. The present revival, which features Elizabeth Ashley as Mrs. Goforth, Amanda Plummer as Blackie, and Marian Seldes as Vera, is strictly for those who feel either that Williams can do no wrong or that no wrong can be done him. That it seems so traumatizingly long and boring may be partly due to the presence of the three actresses of such disparately extravagant tendencies. All three overact dreadfully, but in such different ways that the result, though fascinating, is ultimately exhausting. Miss Ashley favors old-fashioned Method realism, Miss Seldes old-fashioned mannerism. Playing Mrs. Goforth with the rough, gravelly voice of a Texas jukebox mama, Miss Ashley sounds like a lower-class version of Tallulah Bankhead, who played the role in the second Broadway production. Miss Seldes, for her part, is putting her all into getting across the message that the Witch of Capri is a comic character: she does funny things with her mouth, and tilts her body toward or away from the audience, and dangles her absurdly long-seeming arms loose from the elbow. Miss Plummer, meanwhile, is doing her own thing in her own special way. It’s not the naturalistic hamming of Miss Ashley or the great-actress hamming of Miss Seldes, but something newfangled and unique to Miss Plummer—“unnaturalism,” I suppose you might call it. Working hard to seem disengaged from whatever is happening onstage. Wrapped up in her own unholy thoughts, she takes on the aspect of a slightly disturbed adolescent: she’s always looking off somewhere, as though she were seeing Hamlet’s father’s ghost. Incapable of deliver a line without affectation, she speaks now with a Bryn Mawr accent, now in baby talk, now as though English were her second language. To a simple observation—“There’s no wind”—she brings a whole casebook of interesting subtextual meanings.
There is such a thing as honest acting that fails. In Elizabeth Ashley’s Mrs. Goforth I found not a shred of authenticity, but her performance had a kind of misguided integrity. What’s going on with Amanda Plummer and Marian Seldes is something quite different—a kind of passive upstaging not often encountered in the professional theater. Both actresses appear unable to allow themselves to go out of focus, as it were—to watch or listen to another character without seeming to want to attract attention to themselves. They radiate a kind of narcissistic energy, which—when bad acting vies with bad acting on those occasions when the two share the stage—becomes a psychic wrestling match.
The character of Blackie in “Milk Train” is a bit of an anomaly. She doesn’t quite fit into a Tennessee Williams mold. Mrs. Goforth comes from a long line of desperate older women—like Blanche DuBois and Amanda Wingfield, like Alexandra del Lago in “Sweet Bird of Youth”—who live on illusions and dreams of a fairer past, unable to face death head on. Young Flanders is one of Williams’ poet-parasites: he belongs to that crowd of proud, beautiful young men who—like Val Xavier in “Orpheus Descending,” Chance Wayne in “Sweet Bird of Youth,” and the young man in “The roman Spring of Mrs. Stone”—are vagrants and freeloaders yet always, somehow, more spiritually attuned than the women they prey on, and reluctant though wryly willing to be sexually used. Even the bitchy Vera is a Williams type. But Blackie, who is neither greatly overwritten nor sentimentalized, and has some rudimentary capacity for judging those around her, has no precursor—unless, of course, it is Tom in “The Glass Menagerie.” She’s not larger-than-life like most Williams creations are, not realistic either, exactly, but cinematic rather than stagy. Williams couldn’t help daubing her slightly with the too-deep-for-tears mystique of suffering that imbues so many of his characters. (Blackie comes to Mrs. Goforth, for instance, “fresh from the deathbed of [her] young husband.”) Still, standing, like Tom Wingfield, midway between an ethereal spirit and a delusional, she’s the closest thing the play has to a moral norm.
To cast in such a role an actress like Miss Plummer, who specializes in the abnormal—the possessed (“Agnes of God”), the withdrawn (“The Glass Menagerie”), the brain-damaged (Sam Shepard’s “A Lie of the Mind”), the mad (E. L. Doctorow’s “Daniel”)—seems inordinately perverse. Equally perverse is the performance that the director, Kevin Conway, has elicited from Stephen McHattie as Flanders. Mr. McHattie, who made a good Hector Hushabye in a recent revival of “Heartbreak House” at Circle in the Square—here delivers his lines in funereal tones, like a dying prophet or a psychopath. He overacts so badly in silence that we’re bored before he opens his mouth.
Other aspects of the production are equally inexplicable. Candice Donnelly’s costumes are alternately shopworn and anachronistic. Mr. Conway’s direction is a bouillabaisse of mistaken assumptions about what can and cannot be accomplished with non-realistic staging. He has characters glancing at one another through stone walls, and Miss Seldes fishing an olive out of her cocktail with gloved fingers. Even Edward T. Gianfrancesco’s set, the most pleasant aspect of the production, proves ultimately unworkable. Its bright stonework, laced with marble and white bougainvillea, and lighted by Craig Evens, is pretty to look at but requires areas that have been vividly defined as exterior spaces to double as interiors. There isn’t much scenery left, in any case, by the time the cast gets through with it.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, December 7, 1987