Upon entering Hart House Theatre to see The Gentleman Caller: A Memory Play about Tennessee Williams, the stage sets an immediate tone. Three walls of opaque white sheets surround the central actor as he sits with old, blurry, Hollywood films projected onto the textile. The furniture is all white and the table and couch are draped in flowing white fabric. Williams’ New York City apartment is sparse, successfully serving to emphasize the play’s supernatural elements, but otherwise allowing the characters in the production to be the central focus.
The play begins abruptly, with the young man of Williams’s fantasy emerging through the projection with his arms spread out, resembling an angel. The Gentleman Caller examines the last hours of the life of the playwright Tennessee Williams, taking place in a combination of memories, hallucinations and reality. Nigel Bennett plays this role with a masterful balance of crowd-pleasing flamboyancy and crippling insecurity and regret. His effort to manoeuvre the rapidly switching tones of the show is honourable, but ultimately his navigation is not enough to move the script along a plausible trajectory. Bennett’s noteworthy performance is matched by Allegra Fulton, as his mother, and Carmen Grant, as his sister, all of whom portray the Williams family with an entertaining southern charm. They garner laughs from the crowd and display captivating chemistry, but their delivery of the play’s overdramatic dialogue is difficult to behold.
The young man, a hustler, who enters the apartment at the start of the play, is played by Harrison Thomas, a second-year student at Ryerson. Thomas plays multiple roles throughout the play, seducing Tennessee Williams as the hustler and later beating him as his father. Thomas struggles to maintain different accents, and his eruptions of anger are abrupt and unsettling. He appears uncomfortable sharing the stage with more seasoned actors, and also suffers with the histrionic and chaotic script.
The Gentleman Caller is an adventurous play but unfortunately many of its experiments are failures. The effects are sometimes cheesy, and placing the hustler as an angel figure is distastefully overdone, from the tattoo of angel wings on his back to his “A” t-shirt. The talented actors allow for occasional moments of sophisticated theatre, but the script slips into the realm of melodrama, frequently rendering The Gentleman Caller a mediocre lament.
