Highly recommended - ‘The Tennessee Williams Project" - Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun Time 1/23/14. "First, a note of caution: “The Tennessee Williams Project,” The Hypocrites’ audacious showcase of three short, rarely produced plays by the dramatist whose major works (“The Glass Menagerie,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”) have long been standard fare, is not for audiences squeamish about overtly transgressive psycho-sexual behavior. On the other hand, this insightfully mixed-and-matched, often hallucinatory series of voyages into the playwright’s heart of darkness and light can be seen as fascinating side trips to those enduring works, with two of them providing a less censored look at his familiar obsessions. including homoerotic sex, sado-masochism, mother-son relationships, alcoholism, role-playing, love, friendship, loneliness and mortality. The Hypocrites’ production also thrives on a hugely imaginative, intensely physical collaboration between director Matt Hawkins (who starred as Stanley Kowalski in David Cromer’s memorable revival of “Streetcar” at Writers Theatre in 2010), his ingenious design team (sets by San Stratton, lights by William Kirkham, costumes by Alison Siple and sound by Heath Hays), and his cast of six.

And the company’s performance space — the wildly eclectic basement of the Chopin Theatre — could not be more ideally suited to this project. The first stop is the ornate downstairs lobby area, where you are seated on upholstered chairs and settees — a perfect extension of the French Quarter apartment in New Orleans that is the backdrop for “And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens.” The “queen” in question is Candy (Patrick Gannon is sensational), a well-to-do transvestite with a chronic heart problem who is desperate to keep the company of Karl (the excellent Joseph Weins), the hard-drinking sailor he has picked up. Karl might be straight, bisexual, intensely closeted or just desperate for cash. But there is no denying he is both intrigued and threatened by Candy, who craves companionship more than sex, and whose feminine wiles are at once familiar and terrifying to Karl.

For the second play, “The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde,” the audience is ushered into a far more bizarre space — a Victorian English style torture chamber outfitted with gymnasts’ rings and ladders. This is where a tightly bound and corseted cripple, Mint (Gannon), is forced to undergo a Sisyphian struggle during a visit by the decadent, misogynistic Hall (stylish Eric Leonard), a fat-cat former classmate at the Scrotum-on-Swansea boarding school. A mother-maid figure, Mme. Le Monde (blackly comic Mary Redmon), serves tea, and easily outdoes Sweeney Todd’s Mrs. Lovett in nefariousness. The third space entered by the audience is an antiseptic hospital room in St. Louis. Yet this is the backdrop for William’ most spiritual vision. In “The Big Game” (a reference to football, but more crucially, to the game of life), a chronically ill patient, Dave (Gannon), bids an upbeat goodbye to Tony (Weins), a restless college football star who almost lost his leg to an infection but was lucky. He then says hello to Walton (Christopher Meister), a middle aged man about to undergo highly risky brain surgery. All are attended to by a warm-hearted male nurse (Osiris Khepera), and a brusque female one (Redmon). But it is a star-filled universe, glimpsed through a window, that puts everything in perspective here as Williams reminds us that we are all just specks in eternity"

The Tennessee Williams Project - Nina Metz, Chicago Tribune 1/23/14. - ""The world is accident-prone,” shrugs the murderous owner of a rooming house, “and the loss of one fool makes room for another.” That’s a great P.T. Barnum-esque line stuffed into an otherwise tedious, rarely produced one-act from Tennessee Williams. The play, a nasty bit of work called “The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde,” is an experiment in sadistic pastiche that borrows a bit from “Sweeney Todd,” Samuel Beckett and British boarding-school nightmares.

Certainly Williams’ playwriting output in the 1940s and ’50s was up there with the best of them, though the same could be said of his drug and alcohol consumption (which likely led to his death in 1983). It is from those decades in-between that the Hypocrites and director Matt Hawkins have pulled from obscurity three short plays.

Good luck finding definitive background information about these scripts or when precisely they were written; perhaps Williams himself knew they weren’t substantial enough to see the light of day. They are curiosities, no more, no less — though the production design for each is terrifically intricate and smart.

The aforementioned rooming house horror show has little to recommend it beyond a richly smug performance by Eric Leonard as a bloviator going on about his old prep school days.

Also on tap is “The Big Game”, which doesn’t feel like a play so much as an outline for story to-be-determined-later about three hospital patients who bond over their fear of mortality. It’s written in the style of an old educational film from the 1950s, which should be funny, not strangely dull, but there you have it.

“And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens …” is the most overtly “Williams” piece of the trio, with a title that riffs on a line from Shakespeare’s “Richard II” (“For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground, And tell sad stories of the death of kings”).

This is Williams at his least closeted. Gone are the obfuscations and coded language of his masterworks. Set in New Orleans, it concerns the transactional relationship between a sophisticated if emotionally desperate crossdresser (Patrick Gannon) and the thuggish homophobic sailor who can’t quite rebuff his advances (Joseph Wiens).

There’s real sexual tension between Gannon and Wiens, the latter giving just enough hard stares that you can see the guy debating whether he should give into what he clearly desires. The stop-start nature of their flirtation plays as legitimate romantic comedy, particularly the dream sequence that has Wiens sitting down at the piano for a serenade. All of that sours, of course.

And ultimately, it confirms Williams was perhaps the most pessimistic romantic of the 20th century, whether he was writing about gay relationships or straight".

The Tennessee Williams Project - Justin Hayford, Chicago Reader 1/23/14. "In resurrecting three rarely produced Tennessee Williams one-acts, director Matt Hawkins makes it clear why they're rarely produced. The most successful of the trio, And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens . . ., retrofits neurotic, needy Blanche DuBois into neurotic, needy Candy Delaney, a rich New Orleans transvestite pinning romantic delusions onto the short-tempered, heavy-drinking sailor Karl. The iconic characters and bitter poetry can't make up for the play's stalled dramatic engine. The other two, The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme Le Monde and The Big Game, are impenetrable and precious, respectively. Hawkins has a strong cast, but he too often pushes them to breathless extremes, giving much of the nearly two-hour evening a wearying sameness. Typical of Hypocrites productions, the design elements are clever and evocative".

‘THE TENNESSEE WILLIAMS PROJECT’- Kris Vire, TimeOutChicago 1/22/14. "Just imagine this country without queens. It would be absolutely barbaric," cringes the self-described transvestite in And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens…, the first of three Tennessee Williams rarities on this Hypocrites bill. Director Matt Hawkins, who staged the Hypocrites' memorable 2010 production of Cabaret, says he delved into Williams's lesser-known works while preparing to play Stanley in David Cromer's Writers Theatre production of A Streetcar Named Desire that same year. (His wife, Hypocrites company member Stacy Stoltz, played Stella there and serves as assistant director here.) The slate of one-acts Hawkins put together feels quite telling of Williams's career-long obsessions. It also seems like a glimpse into his unrulier side: Where the playwright's major works are dotted with semi-coded references to homosexuality (i.e. the neverending debate about just how close Cat on a Hot Tin Roof's Brick was to poor dead Skipper), And Tell Sad Stories is remarkably blatant for the time it's thought to have been written, the late 1950s. Protagonist Candy (Patrick Gannon) brings sailor Karl (Joseph Wiens) home from the bar to his French Quarter abode, where Candy changes into something more comfortable: a flowing wrap dress, blonde wig, lipstick and fuck-me heels. Karl protests not enough but starts downing Old Grand-Dad while Candy goes on tragically about the life she envisions for them. Staged in the Chopin Theatre's fabulously baroque basement lobby, it's hard not to see the piece as a transfixing and brutal snapshot of a particular pre-Stonewall mindset. Hawkins moves us into the basement theater proper for the second piece on the bill, one thought to have been written near the end of Williams's life in the 1980s, The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde. Sickness and mortality were definitely on the playwright's mind in this far more out-there piece, as were sexual transgressions; the scenario is a visit by Hall (Eric Leonard) to his old boarding school mate Mint (Gannon), now a paraplegic staying in the attic of the ghoulish, sexually depraved Mme. Le Monde (Mary Redmon). But to hear the sadistic Walton tell it, Mint's quite the deviant himself, while Mint, who moves about the space by swinging from "hooks" on the ceiling, claims he's regularly victimized by Le Monde's brute of a son (Wiens). It's all very dark and insinuating, and Hawkins stages it with an indulgent brio similar to Calixto Bieito's controversial take on Williams's Camino Real at the Goodman two years ago, keeping William Kirkham's lighting ominous and Heath Hays's sound design smirkingly ironic, with instrumental covers of Björk's "Human Behaviour" and the Beatles' "Come Together." We move even further into the space for what's the final piece on the slate but the first chronologically, a much more realism-based work set in a St. Louis hospital and thought to be written when Williams was at Washington University there. The Big Game centers on a hospitalized youth, Dave (Gannon), who's losing one roommate, a WashU football player (Wiens) recovering from a leg infection, and gaining another (Meister) who's going in for surgery to remove a brain tumor. Dave, we learn in conversations between the other patients and a pair of nurses (Redmon and Osiris Khepera), is "a congenital heart case"—just as Gannon's character is in And Tell Sad Stories. Even before his sister Rose's diagnosis with schizophrenia and eventual lobotomy, it appears, young Tom was already fixating on the twin specters of disease and death. And references in The Big Game call back, though forward through the decades, to other potent symbols from the other plays, including talk of a meat cleaver and a sultry, red-headed waitress. Hawkins's project is a beguilingly shaggy peek into the far corners of Williams's mind." - Kris Vire, TimeOut Chicago 1/22/14


Recommended - Tennesee Williams Project - Noel Schecter, NewCity Chicago 1/20/14. "Legendary director Elia Kazan once said of Tennessee Williams “Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life.” This insight proves prescient when applied to The Hypocrites production of three of his lesser-known one-act plays. Presented back to back to back (with each play ending with just a jolt of an introduction to the next), the plays mine the same themes of his better-known work (mortality, sexual predators and self-delusion to name a few), but with a bit more creative flourish. It would be hard to imagine, for example, Marlon Brando suddenly breaking out in song (this is exactly what a brutish sailor does in the similar-to-”Streetcar”-feeling first play). Not only are these touches entertaining, they also help the viewer gain better insight into the mindset of a true American theatrical genius. Not every outside-the-box wrinkle works as well—it is unclear why in another play the lead character is reduced to swinging ape-like across a series of suspended rings—but one gets the sense that within these plays Tennessee Williams gave himself permission to experiment a little. Director Matt Hawkins provides a deft touch in linking these three plays together, literally taking the audience from stages set in New Orleans to a London boarding house to a Northeast hospital ward. Patrick Gannon, the protagonist in all three plays, is constantly impressive, whether playing an aging N’awlins transvestite, a British man unable to use his legs or a young man facing his own mortality. The first play (“And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens”) features aging French Quarter transvestite Candy doing her best to be sugar daddy to roughneck Karl (a very convincing Joseph Wiens). Self-delusional to the point that she puts herself in danger, all Candy really wants is to be loved. What Karl wants is anyone’s guess but violence seems a possible conclusion to every scene he is in. Within the cozy confines of the Chopin Theatre’s basement café/stage, the play is almost startling in its immediacy as well as in its sexual tension. Following that play is the less enticing “The Remarkable Rooming House of Mme. Le Monde.” Set in the attic of a boarding house from hell, a crippled man named Mint is reduced to pleading with an old college chum for some restorative tea while at the same time having to swing across the room by suspended rings. Other indignities suffered by Mint include frequent sexual assault by the landlord’s son as well as his friend’s apparent indifference to Mint’s plight. Although clever in parts, it feels too metaphorical to be truly entertaining. Snatches of pop music (such as The Rolling Stones and The Cure) liven up the act and Mary Redmon’s performance as the off-kilter Mme. Le Monde is sure to put a chill in anyone’s spine, though audience members may be left scratching their heads at the play’s conclusion. The final play, “The Big Game,” serves as the logical conclusion to the project. Brief and without any true surprises, the play nonetheless works as a soothing meditation on mortality. Faced with a congenital heart condition, young Dave (Gannon) bonds with a vibrant football star (Joseph Wiens, in a startling transformation from his earlier portrayal of a violent alcoholic in the first play) and another, possibly doomed patient who counsels Dave to look to the stars for mental escape. Whether these relatively obscure works will ultimately prove to be as enduring as his better-known works has yet to be seen, but “The Tennessee Williams Project” is certainly a project worth undertaking."