The Eccentricities of a Nightingale

Critiqued by Holly Bartges

Paul Barrillo’s haunting mural hanging on the back panel for Germinal Stage Denver’s current production of Tennessee Williams’ Eccentricities of a Nightingale tells the story. Look at her face, her stance. As the story unfolds at her feet, her expressions, her meaning appears to follow, changing with each scene. It is an astonishing painting I would love to have hanging in my house, but I would have to move to a mansion on a hill.

Erica Sarzin-Borrillo as Mrs. Winemiller and Fred Lewis as Rev. Winemiller in Germinal Stage Denver's production of The Eccentricities of a Nightingale

Filled with a life force that continually keeps her mouth in motion and her body throbbing with uncontrolled mobility, Alma enchantingly embodied by Gina Wencel, bucks the system. In a society that puts a lid on honesty, Alma wants to speak truth, her truth. Known as the Nightingale in her town where she sings in Church and for social functions, she knows she will never be a professional singer. So what? Singing she loves, speaking her mind she loves, a woman very much ahead of her time. It matters not she crumbles her father into embarrassment. It matters not her father is the Reverend Winemiller. It matters not the prim and proper laugh and sniggle behind her back. She dearly loves her father, feeds on his connection, but she is who she is. Not even that bond can corral her.

Wencel captures Alma’s soul from frolic frenzy to melting heartbreak. The eyes dance with winced pain one moment, and freed spirit the next.

Fred Lewis bows to the love and remorse as a father who cherishes his daughter, as a minister required to walk the straight and narrow making certain his entire family stands up to the scrutiny of the prim and proper.

Alma’s father, an Episcopalian minister, shudders over her eccentricities, and crumbles inside over his wife’s debilitating mental disorder.

Erica Sarzin-Borrillo eyes flashing, darting, embraces Mrs. Winemiller with a far away haunting other place she sees, other place she remembers. At the same time cognizant of what goes on around her. He loves her, deeply, but he cannot reach her. Somehow in the performance, Wencel’s Alma connects with her although their worlds are a universe apart. Something she remembers, something she sees in the foggy distance, something she can’t find, something she can’t face, something breaks her heart, and something leaves her mindlessly foggy. Sarzin-Borrillo engulfs her with artistic masterminded detailed reality.

Gina Wencel as Alma and Brian Landis Folkins as John in Germinal Stage Denver's production of The Eccentricities of a Nightingale

Grabbed by a young puppy love. Unconcerned about reality, Alma pines for the prim and proper Dr. John Buchanan grandly portrayed by Brian Landis-Folkins. Well he’s not exactly prim and proper even though his overbearing, controlled fondling, mother, Mrs. Buchanan deliciously played by Anne Smith Myers wants to contain him in a prim and proper red velvet box. Horrified over Alma’s free spirited don’t-care-about- protocol attitude, she will do anything and everything to keep John and Alma apart, even make up stories. Then she’ll coo over him while plastering his hair with her own spit. No, he isn’t romantically involved with her, but something about her speaks to something within him. He can’t explain, but it’s there.

Feisty Rosemary, delightfully played by Melissa Pear, attends Alma’s Monday night study group. Prepared to read a paper on William Blake, she festers under outspoken Mrs. Bassett, encompassed by Jennifer E. York thunderously announcing he’s corny. No, she won’t read. Yes, she will. No she won’t. It’s a grand scenic display of social misfits reaching out to each other in opposite directions, as Alma flittingly flusters over John. So she broke the rules of the group? So what?

Directed and designed by Ed Baierlein, the entire cast works as though a flame of energy binds them together. Chemistry between the actors flows into the connection between the characters that obviously care about each other without seeing eye-to-eye. Chemistry in a production can be detected within ten seconds of the opening lines. That’s the magic of live theatre. It is either there or it isn’t. In GSD’S Eccentricities of A Nightingale the chemistry is felt before the house lights go down. Did Paul Borrillo capture it in his painting? Is that the haunting aura one senses? Do believe so.

Sallie Diamond’s magical instinct for the right costume for each character and actor once again comes to life in this period piece allowing Eccentricities to be gorgeous to watch as well as unnerving to experience. Truth and reality walk hand in hand within the confines of the stage.

Williams’ brilliant ability to therapeutically base most of the characters in his plays on his own family experience embraces the totality of the human experience. It’s truth about prim and proper, social outcasts, unrealistic love, influence of unrealistic love, and desperate decisions complicated by tormented consequences speak as strongly today, as it did when it first hit the Broadway boards in 1976. Its intrigues, truth, and reality will be as strong a hundred years from now as long as it is produced with the quality GSD offers.

Time is short. This is one production I wish GSD could extend with its tension, excitement, compulsion, chemistry, and social truths brimming with energy displayed by a top-flight cast. When actors love what they are doing, it shows. Eccentricities glistens.

It’s a “Don’t Miss” no matter how short the run.

The Eccentricities of a Nightingale
By Tennessee Williams: Directed by Ed Baierlein Germinal Stage Denver