Presented by the New York Art Theatre at the Theatre at St. Clements, 423 W. 46 St., NYC. Opened Sept. 20 for an open run.
Tennessee Williams worked on "Something Cloudy, Some-thing Clear" intermittently for decades before it was finally produced in 1981, two years before his death. But it feels like a product of his last years, during which he pursued his lost talent through miasmas of drugs and booze. "Something Cloudy, Something Clear" is an autobiographical memory play, like "The Glass Menagerie." The time is September 1940; the place is a shack on the Cape Cod dunes; the protagonist is a young playwright named August. He encounters two "apparitionally beautiful" young people, Kip and Clare, who belong to Williams' long series of wounded birds, desperately in need of protection. August falls in love with Kip. (Kip Kiernan was Williams' first great love.) Arthur Miller once wrote of "The Glass Menagerie" that "an underlying hard dramatic structure was what earned the play its right to sing poetically." Such a structure is what "Cloudy/ Clear"—elliptical, meandering, self-indulgent, with scattered moments of potential beauty and poignancy—most notably lacks.
The current production, directed by Anatole Fourmantchouk and designed by Natalie Rudyuk, buries the play under a heavy load of directorial ego, opting at every moment for arty poeticizing over human reality. For no discernible reason, the stage is strewn with apples. The wind is represented by a not-so-ethereal actor who crosses the stage trailing a black veil. A scene in which Kip submits to August's advances is staged as a nude pas de deux, leaving the complex feelings of the two men unexplored.
The actors are all either miscast or misdirected. Stass Klassen, who plays August, has a thick East European accent that covers Williams' self-portrait like a coat of semi-opaque varnish. Joe Mihalchick as Kip and Elissa Piszel as Clare are solid, prosaic presences, entirely lacking the desperate fragility of their characters. Richard Guerreiro and Chandler Vinton, as pretentious producers interested in August's play, compound the heavy-handed writing of their scenes with heavy-handed acting (though Vinton's sharp wryness is occasionally effective).