Tennessee Speaks in Tongues for You (Or the 3 1/2-Character Play)
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The play opens with a long monologue by the narrator-playwright–a witty comic send-up of the alcohol- and drug-addled Williams of the late 70s and early 80s, a paranoid, tantrum-prone celebrity who turned on friends and snarled at lecture audiences. (Rick Lazarus does a superb job conveying Williams’s declining genius and chemically induced breakdown.) Then comes Tsarov’s sucker punch: we learn that for a year Williams has been infected by a parasite with the power to control his thoughts, feelings, and speech. He explains that it’s a mutation of the isopod Cymothoa exigua, which consumes and replaces the tongue of the spotted rose snapper; once the tongue is gone, the parasite lives off bits of food that enter the fish’s mouth.
In the wrong hands this provocative premise could become a second-rate Twilight Zone episode. But director John McNaughton (who also directed the films Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Wild Things) is an old hand at twisty material. And Tsarov quickly makes it clear that we’re in a much odder, more dangerous world than Twilight Zone. Stealing a page from William S. Burroughs (another drug-using gay writer from Saint Louis), he wrings every paranoid interpretation he can out of his dictator parasite, making it at once a literal alien presence, a metaphor for artistic creation, and an expression of anxiety about our bodies not doing what we want them to.
WHEN Through 10/28: Sat 9:30 PM
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Kristin Basta.
