Festival Spotlight - A Recluse & His Guest
Directed by Pandora Gastelum
Venue: Crown and Anchor, 247 Commercial Street
“Magic is the habit of our existence.”
A mysterious woman wrapped in leather, a foreigner in all countries —who knows the language of birds, hounds, and swine—seeks refuge with a hermit she bathes, feeds, and perhaps comes to love.
Staged with actors, marionettes, and shadow puppets by the Mudlark Theater of New Orleans in association with Night Shade Shadow Theater under the direction of Pandora Gastelum.
The recluse has a name – Ott. His self-invited guest, Nevrika, is an extreme example of what Williams meant when he announced (in 1962) that he was through writing about southern belles. Nevrika is an angular androgynous woman wrapped in leather so stinky she keeps the wolves at bay. Nevrika stalks a frozen Northern waste. Blanche Dubois, she ain’t.
The Recluse and His Guest began as a short story with the same title, published by Playboy in 1970. By 1982, the year before Williams died, his agents were passing around an hour-long stage adaptation, which fleshed out the frozen world of the imaginary city of Staad. Williams invented trapler (fish), chokstrass (an herb), renzigs (coins), and kreesniks (an animal hunted in the salt marshes of Glik). Some dialogue is in an invented language:
WOMAN: Friks?
RECLUSE: — Trah. Ganst?
WOMAN: Leegloog!
RECLUSE: — Akh
Between 1926 and 1928, when Williams can be presumed to have read Weird Tales, a third of the issues mention a recluse. Recluses in Weird come to a bad end: several die in fires, some are attacked by wolves or, given a chance to meet a nice girl, revert to misanthropy. Frozen wastes were a staple of Weird Tales beginning with Volume 1, Number 1 (March 1923)’s “Amazing yarn of weird adventure in the frozen North.” In the frozen wastes of Weird, people usually die of exposure. Williams subverts Weird expectations: Nevrika persuades Ott to attend the Staad Spring Festival, which celebrates the ice going out to sea. The tavern-keeper hailing Ott’s appearance strides downstage to announce (presumably to the audience) “Magic is the habit our existence.” The same phrase is spoken in Williams’ Two Character Play when withered sunflowers bloom.
At the Spring festival a girl in a flowered dress is asked to sing. There’s only one song she’s willing to perform.
On a tall-sailed ship
He went to the sky.
I never guessed it was half that high.
But a tall-sailed ship knows better than I
And there are secrets in the sky.
As with other Williams’ fantasies, the arrival of a ship obliterating the boundaries between sea and sky heralds a new beginning: in this life or in an afterlife. Williams’ fable resembles the twentieth century Gothic Tales of Isak Dinesen, including Dinesen’s Northern Sea settings, mordant wit, and possibilities of salvation. The play pivots crucially between death and life when Nevrika comes down a flight of stairs.
In 2016 Cosmin Chivu staged the world premiere of the play at New York’s Walkerspace.
