Decoding Tennessee Williams

Laura Siner as Miriam and Niall O’Hegarty as Mark in in Tennesse Williams’ lost autobiographical work, “In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel.”

The White Horse Theater Company fills in the blanks of a lost classic

By Jerry Tallmer

Mark, the artist — the dying painter of Tennessee Williams’s “In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel” — thinks he’s the inventor, the discoverer, of color. The Vasco de Gama of pigment, so to speak.

Tennessee Williams didn’t invent color, he just poured more of it more sensitively into the English language than you or I might manage to do in a lifetime.

The language of “In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel,” as well as the language beneath the language of this all but forgotten 1968 autobiographical gaze by Williams into a fun-house distorting mirror, is far more jagged, broken, herky-jerky, and peppered with weirdly uncompleted sentences than, I’m quite sure, anything else the man ever wrote.

“I found it a hard read,” says Cyndy A. Marion, director of the production by her White Horse Theater Company that’s at the Abingdon Complex on West 36th Street through February 18. “I couldn’t get through it, the first time I tackled it. It was actually my father who felt it had to be done, and gave me the courage and confidence to do it.”

That her father, John Marion, is a retired supplier of artificial flowers to stores like Macy’s and Lord & Taylor, and that “In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel” is full of talk and imagery of flowers, may have something to do with the case.

In brief — very brief — a good-looking, sharp-talking woman named Miriam has come to Tokyo to try to get her husband, Mark the painter, to go home to America where he can decently die. Meantime she applies herself to seducing — trying to seduce — every male in sight, beginning with the stoic, non-cooperative Bar-man of this very bar. Presently there arrives from America the artist’s New York dealer, a gray sort of chap named Leonard — perhaps the only male this Miriam would never try to seduce. And then the dying, hallucinating Mark staggers down to the bar …

“In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel” so disturbed Clive Barnes, then on The New York Times, when he saw it at the (now long gone) Eastside Playhouse in 1969, that he said he felt like sending a telegram of complaint to Tennessee Williams. “The play seems almost too personal,” Barnes wrote, “and as a result too painful to be seen in the cold light of public scrutiny.”

It hasn’t thrown Cyndy Marion, however, nor did it throw (the late) Eve Adamson when, in 1975, she brought it to the stage of her Jean Cocteau Repertory, nor when she reprised it there in 1979 in response to Williams’s: “Please, please, Eve, do it again.”

In many ways, says Ms. Marion, “the play is written in code.” As, for instance:

MIRIAM [to the Japanese Bar-man]: The flower on the table, will you please remove it?

BAR-MAN: Why?

MIRIAM: Because I don’t like objects that disguise their true nature, and there is nothing on earth that disguises its true nature more cunningly than a flower, even when cut and stuck in a vase in a bar.

BAR-MAN: If I have understood you, what is the true nature of?

MIRIAM: Rapacious. You know that word? … Maybe a stronger word is ravenous.

BAR-MAN: Do you mean you are a flower?

MIRIAM: You know what I am.

BAR-MAN: I have had — am I speaking correctly?

MIRIAM: Yes. Continue. Go on with.

BAR-MAN: On our island which is too small for its habitations?

MIRIAM: Inhabitants.

BAR-MAN: Thank you. We prefer flowers to.

MIRIAM [smiles]: You had an idiomatic expression on your mind.

BAR-MAN; I believe the word is ancient and universal.

Now this, with its truncated sentences, particularly “We prefer flowers to —,” made no sense at all to Ms. Marion until this past December, down in the archives at the University of Texas at Austin, as she was comparing Williams’s original script with actress Anne Meacham’s 1969 Eastside script — all scribbled over and slashed and emended by Williams himself in rehearsals — the word “bitches” jumped out.

BAR-MAN: We prefer flowers to bitches.

That made sense, and propelled the whole play right along.

“But if Miriam comes across as just a bitch,” says Cyndy Marion, “the play, for me, doesn’t work.”

In which respect she notes that Tennessee Williams once said: “This play is two sides of one whole,” the one whole — a compound of the artist and the wife — being Tennessee Williams himself. Just as that wife — however brash — has guilt, so did Williams have guilt over not being able to give greater emotional warmth to the dying, in 1963, of his longtime lover, Frank Merlo, 20 years before Williams himself would choke to death on a bottle top.

“He couldn’t deal with Merlo’s sickness and dying, he ran from it, just like woman in the play,” says the director.

Cyndy Marion, born in Manhattan in 1974, has a B.A. from Davison College, an M.F.A. from Brooklyn College. She co-founded the White Horse Theater Company in 2002. Until now, they’ve done nothing but Sam Shepard.

The Miriam at the Abingdon Theatre Arts Complex is Laura Siner. The Bar-man is Toshiji Takeshima. The Mark is Niall O’Hegarty. The Leonard is Greg Homison. And a Hawaiian Lady is Larissa Laurel.

Jon Lee, the actor who was the Bar-man back in 1969, told Ms. Marion that there was one line in the play, spoken by Miriam, at which Williams always burst into laughter: “Hong-Kong, Singapore, Bangkok — what a name for a city!”

And that’s a complete sentence.