“We’re with this couple for the most intense moments of their lives, as they’re sort of negotiating whose truth is the real truth,’’ says director Travis Chamberlain. “And those realities are only able to merge, ultimately, through sex. Which is, when you think about it, true for most couples. It’s just an extreme of that.’’
When people leave the show, they don’t necessarily know what happened to - or between - Mr. and Mrs. Claude Dunphy. “Many people feel like they’ve made a decision, but the decisions are all across the map,’’ says Erin Markey, who plays the wife.
The play was written by Tennessee Williams in 1970 and unpublished for almost 40 years. His frequently maligned late plays, which in recent years have captured the attention of scholars, are often wildly over the top, as in “The Remarkable Rooming House of Madame Le Monde,’’ produced here by Beau Jest Moving Theatre in 2009. But when offered the chance to stage one of them for a festival, New York director Chamberlain chose “Green Eyes,’’ in part because it echoed the tone of Williams classics like “A Streetcar Named Desire’’ while more openly pushing sexual boundaries.
“I think of it as sort of Tennessee Williams unbarred a little bit,’’ says Chamberlain. “It’s what we think of as classic Williams, just that everything that would happen offstage in the ‘masterpieces’ happens onstage, in real time. And we’ve confined it to a real space, so it’s real, real, real, supposedly.’’
Chamberlain knew who he wanted to play the wife: cabaret and performance artist Markey, with whom he’d worked before. The initial workshop was followed by a production in a room in Manhattan’s Hudson Hotel last winter that got strongly felt, if mixed, reviews lauding Markey’s no-holds-barred performance. Now Chamberlain and Company One are bringing Markey and the show to the Ames, which is owned by the same hotel group. New York actor Alan Brincks plays the soldier-husband here. A slightly larger room means they can wedge in 25 audience members, instead of 14 as they did in New York. And the show is listed as 18-plus.
