Original article here.
By Ellen Johnson, Special to The Tuscaloosa News
Eccentric characters can steal a story. As in the case of tormented Blanche from "A Streetcar Named Desire," the louche, prancing Captain Jack Sparrow in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies, or Heath Ledger's maniacal Joker in "Dark Knight," audiences often feel drawn to the broken, the weird and the wacky.
"Even as an outcast, we can still have a full life and a fully realized life if we embrace who we are," said Raines Carr, a third-year master of fine art directing student, and director of the University of Alabama Department of Theatre and Dance production of Tennessee Williams' "The Eccentricities of a Nightingale."
The offbeat outcast is Alma, an overly passionate Episcopalian priest's daughter living in small-town Mississippi, just before World War I. Like others of Williams characters, Alma finds her intensity and her out-sized sensitivities push her to the outskirts of society, as she struggles to win the heart of a neighbor, a young doctor she's loved her whole life.
The cast of UA students has been rehearsing in the Allen Bales Theatre since the first week of spring semester classes. The script was based on Williams' 1948 play, "Summer and Smoke," which the writer revised in 1964 as "Nightingale."
Alma is played by Chelsea Reynolds, an master of fine arts acting student who's been seen in other UA productions, such as "Young Frankenstein," "Appropriate," and "42nd Street." eynolds has dreamed of playing Alma since high school.
"I can honestly say that Alma is the most difficult role I have ever had the pleasure of playing in my entire life," Reynolds said. "But when you're able to find those moments of honesty within the turmoil on stage with your acting partners, it becomes the most satisfied and fulfilled I've ever been on stage in my career."
Alma fails, again and again, in pursuit of the doctor. But in that journey, she realizes it's not about him after all.
"What she discovers throughout this story is that it's not about ... falling in love with men, it's that I can just be myself, and if I'm myself I can be happy," Carr said.
The intimacy of the 150-seat thrust-stage Allen Bales Theatre should pull the audience straight into the story, he said.
"The audience becomes complicit in the action of the play," he said. "I've put it in a very expressionistic world so it's trying to well up your emotions, not just see a story, but feel a story. I think it will be a very interesting auditory, visual, sensory experience for everyone."
Williams' regard for the unconventional touched Carr's life; the playwright has long been one of his heroes.
"I think it's very important in this day and time to sort of look at other people, especially different people, and be able to understand that they have the human needs and human wants we have, even if they have an eccentric way about them," he said. "It's OK that we're different."
Reynolds read Williams' "The Glass Menagerie" while home-schooled for a semester, due to a neurological disorder. She felt a connection with fragile Laura, whose crippling shyness, abetted by a limp from a childhood bout with polio, keeps her indoors.
"Saying Laura's lines aloud when I was going through something so painfully similar was cathartic and life-changing, and I can't believe I get to be a part of one of my hero's works," Reynolds said. "In Alma's words, it really is the coming true of one of my 'most improbable dreams.'
"Mr. Williams' text is incredibly beautiful and poetic, but when you strip it all down to its core, we've all felt alone, ridiculed, and eccentric, whether or not that's the word we would choose to describe ourselves."
A modern viewer can connect with the characters' plights, she said.
"I hope that if any audience member feels imprisoned in their own life in any way, this play will show them their own gallantry within themselves to break free of that prison," she said.