Vieux Carre (2 page)

During a photo shoot for
People
magazine in 1977, Tennessee Williams returned to 722 Rue Toulouse. His visit could not be described as pleasurable, however, because the extensive renovations to the house disturbed him profoundly. The building's roof had been lowered to what architects considered its original height, converting Williams's former third floor quarters to attic air conditioning space. Ironically, efforts to restore and preserve the exterior of the ancient building had destroyed the interior as Williams remembered it. The staircase, however, was still
intact—
that winding ascent that some forty years ago transported those lost souls to their respective cubicles of despair. And looking over his shoulder, in the “lighter gray of the alcove with its window over Toulouse Street,” Tennessee Williams might still have been able to trace the faint outline of the angel in the alcove blessing the spiritual residue of those long-departed misfits.

Robert Bray

STAGE SETTING FOR THE NOTTINGHAM PLAYHOUSE PRODUCTION BY VOYTEK

The Nottingham Playhouse Production of
Vieux Carré
was presented at The Playhouse Theatre, Nottingham, on May 16, 1978 and at the Piccadilly Theatre, London, by Ian B. Albery for Calabash Productions Ltd., on August 9, 1978. It was directed by Keith Hack; stage design was by Voytek, lighting by Francis Reid, costumes by Maria Björnson, and music by Jeremy Nicholas; company stage manager, James Gill. The cast in order of appearance was as follows:

TIME
: The period between winter 1938 and spring 1939.

PLACE
: A rooming house, No. 722 Toulouse Street, in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

THE SETTING OF THE PLAY
: The stage seems bare. Various playing areas may be distinguished by sketchy partitions and doorframes. In the barrenness there should be a poetic evocation of all the cheap rooming houses of the world. This one is in the Vieux Carré of New Orleans, where it remains standing, at 722 Toulouse Street, now converted to an art gallery. I will describe the building as it was when I rented an attic room in the late thirties, not as it will be designed, or realized for the stage.

It is a three-story building. There are a pair of alcoves, facing Toulouse Street. These alcove cubicles are separated by plywood, which provides a minimal separation (spatially) between the writer (myself those many years ago) and an older painter, a terribly wasted man, dying of tuberculosis, but fiercely denying this circumstance to himself.

A curved staircase ascends from the rear of a dark narrow passageway from the street entrance to the kitchen area. From there it ascends to the third floor, or gabled attic with its mansard roof.

A narrow hall separates the gabled cubicles from the studio (with skylight) which is occupied by Jane and Tye.

Obviously the elevations of these acting areas can be only suggested by a few shallow steps: a realistic setting is impossible, and the solution lies mainly in very skillful lighting and minimal furnishings.

WRITER
[
spotlighted downstage
]: Once this house was alive, it was occupied once. In my recollection it still is but by shadowy occupants like ghosts. Now they enter the lighter areas of my memory.

MRS. WIRE
: Nursie!
Nursie—
where's my pillows?

Hey, what the hell is going on in there!

NURSIE
[
running down in a sort of football crouch
]: A bat, a bat's in the kitchen!

MRS. WIRE
: Bat? I never seen a bat nowhere on these premises, Nursie.

NURSIE
: Why, Mizz Wire, I swear it was a bull bat up there in the kitchen. You tell me no bats, why, they's a pack of bats that hang upside down from that ole banana tree in the courtyard from dark till daybreak, when they all scream at once and fly up like
a—
explosion
of—
damned souls out of a graveyard.

MRS. WIRE
: If such a thing was
true—

NURSIE
: As God's word is true!

MRS. WIRE
: I repeat, if such a thing was
true—
which it
isn't—
an' you go tawkin' about it with you big black mouth, why it could ruin the reputation of this rooming house which is the only respectable rooming house in the Quarter. Now where's my pillows, Nursie?

NURSIE
[sotto voce
as she arranges the pallet
]: Shit . . .

MRS. WIRE
: What you say?

NURSIE
: I said shoot . . . faw shit. You'd see they're on the cot if you had a light bulb in this hall. [
She is making up the cot
.] What you got against light? First thing God said on the first day of creation was, “Let there be light.”

MRS. WIRE
: You hear him say that?

NURSIE
: You never read the scriptures.

MRS. WIRE
: Why should I bother to read 'em with you quotin' 'em to me like a female preacher. Book say this, say that, makes me sick of the book. Where's my flashlight, Nursie?

NURSIE
: 'Sunder the pillows. [
She stumbles on a heavy knapsack
.] Lawd! What that there?

MRS. WIRE
: Some crazy young man come here wantin' a room. I told him I had no vacancies for Bourbon Street bums. He dropped that sack on the floor and said he'd pick it up tomorrow, which he won't unless he pays fifty cents for storage . . .

NURSIE
: It's got something written on it that shines in the dark.

MRS. WIRE
:
“Sky”—
say that's his name. Carry it on upstairs with you, Nursie.

NURSIE
: Mizz Wire, I cain't hardly get myself up them steps no more, you know that.

MRS. WIRE
: Shoot.

NURSIE
: Mizz Wire, I think I oughta inform you I'm thinkin' of retirin'.

MRS. WIRE
:
Retirin'
to what, Nursie? The banana tree in the courtyard with the bats you got in your head?

NURSIE
: They's lots of folks my age, black an' white, that's called bag people. They just wander round with paper bags that hold ev'rything they possess or they can collect. Nights they sleep on doorsteps: spend days on boxes on corners of Canal Street with a tin cup. They get along: they
live—
long as intended to by the Lord.

MRS. WIRE
: Yor place is with me, Nursie.

NURSIE
: I can't please you no more. You keep callin' Nursie, Nursie, do this, do that, with all these stairs in the house and my failin' eyesight. No Ma'am, it's time for me to retire.

MRS. WIRE
: Who? Who?

WRITER
:
It's—

MRS. WIRE
:
You
. . .

WRITER
: Mrs. Wire, you're blinding me with that light. [
He shields his left eye with a band
.]

MRS. WIRE
[
switching off the light
]: Git upstairs, boy. We'll talk in the mawnin' about your future plans.

WRITER
: I have no plans for the future, Mrs. Wire.

MRS. WIRE
: That's a situation you'd better correct right quick.

WRITER
: What's
—
?

MRS. WIRE
: Carry that sack upstairs with you. Nursie refused to.

WRITER
: Mrs. Wire told me to carry this sack up here.

NURSIE
: Just put it somewhere it won't trip me up.

WRITER
: Sky? Sky?

NURSIE
: She say that's his name. Whose name? I think her mind is goin' on her again. Lately she calls out, “Timmy, Timmy,” or she carries on conversations with her dead husband, Horace . . .

WRITER
: A
name—
Sky? [
To himself
.] Shines like a prediction.

MRS. WIRE
[
starting up from her cot
]: Who? Who?

JANE
: Why, Mrs. Wire, you scared me! [
She has an elegance about her and a vulnerability
.]

MRS. WIRE
: Miss Sparks, what're you doin' out so late on the streets of the Quarter?

JANE
: Mrs. Wire, according to the luminous dial on my watch, it is only ten after twelve.

MRS. WIRE
: When I give you a room here . . .

JANE
: Gave me? I thought rented . . .

MRS. WIRE
: [
cutting through
]: I told you a single girl was expected in at midnight.

JANE
: I'm afraid I didn't take that too seriously. Not since I lived with my parents in New Rochelle, New York, before I went to college, have I been told to be in at a certain hour, and even then I had my own key and disregarded the order more often than not. However! I
am
going to tell you why and where I've gone tonight. I have gone to the all-night drugstore, Waterbury's, on Canal Street, to buy a spray can of Black Flag, which is an insect repellent. I took a cab there tonight and made this purchase because, Mrs. Wire, when I opened the window without a screen in my room, a cockroach, a
flying
cockroach, flew
right into my face and was followed by a squadron of others.
Well
! I do
not
have an Oriental, a Buddhistic tolerance for certain insects, least of all a cockroach and even less a flying one. Oh, I've learned to live reluctantly with the ordinary pedestrian kind of cockroach, but to have one fly directly into my face almost gave me convulsions! Now as for the window without a screen, if a screen has not been put in that window by tomorrow, I will buy one for it myself and deduct the cost from next month's rent. [
She goes past Mrs. Wire toward the steps
.]

MRS. WIRE
: Hold on a minute, young lady. When you took your room here, you gave your name as Miss Sparks. Now is that young fellow that's living up there with you Mr. Sparks, and if so why did you register as Miss instead of Mrs.?

JANE
: I'm sure you've known for some time that I'm sharing my room with a young man, whose name is not Mr. Sparks, whose name is Tye McCool. And if that offends your moral
scruples—
well—
sometimes it offends mine, too.

MRS. WIRE
: If I had not been a young lady myself once! Oh yes, once, yaiss! I'd have evicted both so fast you'd think that . . .

JANE
: No, I've stopped thinking. Just let things happen to me.

NURSIE
: Why, hello, Miss Sparks.

JANE
: Good evening,
Nursie—
why is Mrs. Wire sleeping in the entrance hall?

NURSIE
: Lawd, that woman, she got the idea that 722 Toulouse
Street is the address of a jailhouse. And she's the
keeper—
have some hot chick'ry with me?

JANE
: Do you know I still don't know what chicory is? A beverage of some kind?

NURSIE
: Why chicory's South'n style coffee.

JANE
: Oh, well, thank you, maybe I could try a bit of it to get me up that flight of stairs . . .

MRS. WIRE
: Who? Ah!

NIGHTINGALE
[
voice rising
]: Well, cousin, uh, Jake . . .

PICKUP
[
uneasily
]: Blake.

NIGHTINGALE
: Yes, we do have a lot of family news to exchange. Come on in. We'll talk a bit more in my room.

MRS. WIRE
: In a pig's snout you will!

NIGHTINGALE
: Why, Mrs. Wire! [
He chuckles, coughs
.] Are you sleeping in the hall now?

MRS. WIRE
: I'm keeping watch on the comings and goings at night of tenants in my house.

NIGHTINGALE
: Oh, yes, I know your aversion to visitors at night, but this is my first cousin. I just bumped into him at Gray Goose bus station. He is here for one day only, so I have taken
the license of inviting him in for a little family talk since we'll have no other chance.

MRS. WIRE
: If you had half the cousins you claim to have, you'd belong to the biggest family since Adam's.

PICKUP
: Thanks, but I got to move on. Been nice seeing
you—
cousin . . .

NIGHTINGALE
:
Wait—
here—
take this five. Go to the America Hotel on Exchange Alley just off Canal Street, and I will drop in at noon
tomorrow—
cousin . . . [
He starts to cough
.]

PICKUP
: Thanks, I'll see ya, cousin.

MRS. WIRE
: Hah, cousin.

Don't you spit by my bed!

NIGHTINGALE
: Fuck off, you old witch!

MR. WIRE
: What did you say to me?

NIGHTINGALE
: Nothing not said to and about you before! [
He mounts the steps
.]

MRS. WIRE
: Nursie! Nursie! [
Receiving no response she lowers herself with a groan onto the cot
.]

NIGHTINGALE
[
starting up the stairs
]: Midnight
staircase—
still
in—
your [
coughs
] fatal position . . . [
He climbs slowly up
.]

MARY MAUDE
: Nursie? Miss Carrie and I ordered a little more dinner this evening than we could eat, so we had the waiter put the remains of the,
the—

MISS CARRIE
[
her wild eyes very wild
]: The steak “Diane,” I had the steak Diane and Mary Maude had the chicken “bonne femme.” But our eyes were a little bigger than our stomachs.

MARY MAUDE
: The sight of too much on a table can kill your appetite! But this food is too good to waste.

MISS CARRIE
: And we don't have ice to preserve it in our room, so would you kindly put it in Mrs. Wire's icebox, Nursie.

NURSIE
: The last time I done that Miss Wire raised Cain about it, had me throw it right out. She said it didn' smell good.

JANE
: I have an icebox in which I'd be glad to keep it for you ladies.

MARY MAUDE
: Oh, that's very kind of you!

WRITER
[
rising from the kitchen table
]: Let me carry it up.