Theater: Petit Guignol

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SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH

by TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

Oscar Wilde said it was impossible for a sensitive person to read of the death of Little Nell without laughing. Tennes see Williams provokes the same irreverence with his cloying presentation of little Heavenly's fate in Sweet Bird of Youth. Heavenly has had her "youth" cut out, leaving her "to rattle like a dried-up vine where the gulf wind blows." Bluntly put, she underwent a hysterectomy at age 15 after getting the clap from her lover, Superstud Chance Wayne, just before he skipped town to pursue a gigolo's career. Now, years later, Chance returns to claim Heavenly, ignorant of the harm he has done her.

His arrival creates a sensation, for he is on the arm of an aging Hollywood star, the Princess Kosmonopolis, whose drug kick he plans to use to blackmail her out of her fortune. But Heavenly's father, Boss Finley intervenes; he puts out a contract on Chance's manhood.

Actors' Showcase. Age has not refined Sweet Bird's effulgent bathos. The reduction of personality to sex organs is the dynamic of skin flicks and soap op era. Sad to say, Williams wrote this Petit Guignol sideshow in the late '50s, soon after completing his masterpiece, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Today it seems fatally misconceived, a sentimental melodrama instead of a savage, black comedy on southern mores.

But revivals are not only a play's test; they are a showcase for actors to strut their stuff. Sweet Bird has one terrific part: the frowsy monster of a princess.

This plum has been given to Irene Worth, a great actress. She overwhelms the play, with a sexy vibrato not unlike Al Jolson's, and stalks the stage like a jaguar vacationing among field mice.

Across her ravaged face chase self-pity, fear, vanity and — finally — triumph, when she kicks the heel who tried to tread on her. Overshadowed, Christopher Walken plays Chance from the crotch — not inappropriately, consider ing the man's end. The overall impression is of a classy parody of Pal Joey.

This adds irony to Chance's desperate mutter: "Something's gotta mean something. thing."