Sweet Bird of Youth

Goodman Theatre, Chicago

(312) 443-3800

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The curtain rises on Diane Lane in a hotel bed, looking “a bleary, smeary mess,” said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. But don’t be fooled. Her character, faded starlet Alexandra Del Lago, may seem a drug-addled recluse who’s fallen prey to a blackmailing caretaker/gigolo (played by the “exceptionally able-bodied and heartbreakingly credible” Finn Wittrock). But “there’s still fire in this ash heap,” as Lane will prove. Resembling “a bedraggled cross of Judy Garland and Vivien Leigh in their final years,” she offers a “scarily intelligent” portrait of a woman warped and sustained by life in the spotlight.

Yet she shrewdly doesn’t allow the performance to become a showy star turn, said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. Tennessee Williams’s 1959 play isn’t just about Alexandra, after all. Even her lover isn’t interested mainly in her or in using her. Rather, it’s winning the hand of Heavenly Finley (Kristina Johnson), the daughter of a hypocritical right-wing politician obsessed with purity. Williams now looks prescient for having anticipated the culture wars of the 1970s and beyond, but Sweet Bird of Youth is “a difficult, meandering text.” David Cromer’s approach may have its faults, but at least he’s “rightly homed in on the play’s key idea”: that it’s Wittrock’s Chance Wayne, not Alexandra, who’s the has-been, the fool desperately clinging to fading youth.

Too often, unfortunately, the whole show “turns into the echo of an overheated B-movie of the 1950s,” said Hedy Weiss in the Chicago Sun-Times. It’s not unusual for a Tennessee Williams play to traffic in florid dialogue and pulpy drama, but this production’s lavish design adds serious ostentation to the mix, resulting in “more tabloid brashness than dreamy reverie.” Still, that barely dims the impression made by the two leads and the intriguing relationship they bring to life. Chance and Alexandra, united primarily by certain emotional and physical transactions, are engaged in a Darwinian battle for survival. “Just who is the fittest, or most resilient, turns out to be quite surprising.”