Q&A with John Dennis Anderson
Q: Something Cloudy, Something Clear takes place in two times: the past and the present. How does that affect your performance?
In the play, my character August is an avatar of Williams; several times he uses the metaphor of a “double exposure” for the superimposed time frames of present and past. As an actor, my 70-year-old physical self is always present. When August conjures moments from his past, his younger self speaks through my older embodiment. It’s not so much that I toggle back and forth between present and past as that I embody and voice a doubly exposed August.
Q: What are the differences between 29-year-old August and older August?
In 1940, 29-year-old August has a cataract (as did Williams at that age) that makes his left eye cloudy, so he avoids eye contact unless he’s drunk, he says--or horny, I’m guessing. He tells Clare that he wears sunglasses to mask his cloudy eye, so I sometimes put on the sunglasses for the 1940 August, often taking them off to signal the shifts to older August. It’s telling that Williams gives Kip’s companion the name Clare (clear). She functions in the play as a kind of conscience, reminding him to see beyond the sensual to a spiritual plane. The older August is aware of how his lust for Kip blinded his younger self; he sees more clearly in the present the questionable ethics of the bargain he offers Kip. I see his naked exposure of his past selfishness as a kind of penance, even as he vividly relives the intensity and pain of his first passionate relationship with a man.
Q: You're also playing Tom in The Glass Menagerie. How do the two roles support each other?
Tom, another avatar of Williams, is also exposing a selfish act, that of abandoning his mother and sister. But Tom’s escape from his family is a desperate act of survival. He describes his life with them as a nailed-up coffin. In order to find himself artistically and sexually, he had to get out.
It’s fascinating to juxtapose these two memory plays, The Glass Menagerie written in the 1940s about the late 1930s and Something Cloudy, Something Clear written in the late 1970s that is mostly about the summer of 1940 but also includes flashblacks from other decades. There are countless echoes between the plays, such as the theme of bargaining, of coming to terms: for escape in the earlier play, for sex and money in the later play. Similar elements are highlighted when the same actors play characters that represent archetypes in the Williams pantheon (the male sex object, the faded Southern belle, the damaged sister). Both plays have climactic kisses, recurring fetishized objects (a typewriter, a victrola) and even tiny, granular echoes such as glancing references to parades and the sphinx. An important through-line in both plays is love and the need for forgiveness.
You can purchase tickets to Something Cloudy Something Clear here.
