Orpheus Descending / Suddenly Last Summer

Tennessee Williams renamed his most beloved late play “Two-Character Play” to “The Cry”. “I was forced to cry out, and I did,” he said. Unhappy and no longer young actors—brother Felice and sister Claire—discuss the play they are about to perform. The play was written by Felice himself and directly concerns their lives. The conversation slips unnoticed into the play; one reality overlays the other, and it becomes unclear where life is and where theater is. Left alone with their past, Felice and Claire remember how their father shot their mother, and then shot himself. They suffer from the hopelessness of these memories, stage their own past and its possible variations. Trapped with no one else but themselves in a closed theater, beyond which there is horror and emptiness, they start again and again playing “the play for two”—not for the audience, but for themselves.

The action of the play “Orpheus Descends into Hell” takes place in a small provincial town in the state of Mississippi in the house of Jeb Torrance, owner of the general store and leader of the local Ku Klux Klan. He has just returned from the hospital accompanied by his wife, Lady. The examination shows that his days are numbered, but even in this condition he instills terror in those around him—especially in his wife, who twenty years ago was forced to marry him after the death of her Italian father, burned together with his café and vineyard by the Ku Klux Klan for not refusing to sell his wine to Black people. Lady hires a young man named Val, brought to her by the wife of the local sheriff, who was driven mad by his “wild beauty” and intoxicating gaze. But Val doesn’t respond to the woman’s flirting—he immediately focuses on Lady, and after talking with her he understands that he has found a kindred soul: a free person like him, a person on whom no mark has yet been burned—no matter how life has turned out.