The action unfolds several feet, and sometimes just several inches, from the eyes of the audience, which is capped at 25 per performance. Instead of being comfortably sealed off from the outside world, spectators can look out the window and see the lights of cars crawling by on the street below while an urban symphony of honks and sirens pierces the play’s periodic silences.
You’re not likely to be distracted much. Erin Markey delivers a fearless and spellbinding performance as the enigmatic young wife, and Alan Brincks is very nearly her match as the husband, a soldier about to return to a war zone, called “Waakow’’ but clearly meant to represent Vietnam.
“Green Eyes’’ is a coproduction of Company One and the New York-based experimental theater troupe the Kindness, headed by Chris Keegan. It was Keegan who produced “Green Eyes’’ in New York last year, presented by Performance Space 122, at the Hudson Hotel in Manhattan. The production at the Ames Hotel on Court Street is directed by Travis Chamberlain, who also helmed the New York production.
While “Green Eyes’’ is not remotely in the same league as such Williams masterworks as “A Streetcar Named Desire’’ and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,’’ it shares with those dramas a preoccupation with the double-sided nature of sexual desire, the notion that a fierce attraction can imprison as much as it can liberate.
As with “The Remarkable Rooming House of Madame Le Monde,’’ another late Williams play that was produced in 2009 by Beau Jest Moving Theatre at the Charlestown Working Theater, “Green Eyes’’ illustrates how forcefully the playwright embraced the chance to delve into the darker regions of the human psyche once he was no longer constrained by the limitations on profanity and depictions of sexuality that held sway earlier in his career.
