Tiger Tail
Written by Tennessee Williams
Directed by Geoffrey Horne
Battery Park, Manhattan, NYC
June 12-22, 2025
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| Billie Andersson. Photo by Amy Goossens. |
One might associate Tennessee Williams, whose work is full of characters who are trapped–often in inadequate domestic spaces, relationships, or both–with claustrophobic enclosure rather than the openness, even expansiveness, of outdoor theater. However, in bringing Williams's rarely performed Tiger Tail to Battery Park's Castle Clinton, Shakespeare Downtown demonstrates that the work loses none of its sweaty intensity in the move to the open air. The forerunners of Tiger Tail are a pair of Williams one-acts, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1946) and The Long Stay Cut Short (1946), which provided the basis for the Williams-penned and Elia Kazan-directed film Baby Doll (1956), which itself Williams later adapted into Tiger Tail, published in 1978. This textual history introduces an interesting temporal ambiguity in that the play itself doesn't say when it is set, and it seems equally plausible that that setting is closer to the time of the one-acts' composition or is just a reflection of the impoverishment of the play's locale closer to the time of Tiger Tail's publication–this production suggests the latter in its choice of the song that its central character blasts from her radio. Admission to Shakespeare Downtown's Tiger Tail is free, and spectators can secure tickets at Castle Clinton beginning at 6 pm on the day of the performance. |
| Steven J. Cambria and Billie Andersson. Photo by Amy Goossens |
The play is set in the eponymous Mississippi town of Tiger Tail (and summers in NYC these days may offer a reasonable approximation of Mississippi–though, happily, not on the night when we attended), where Baby Doll Meighan (Billie Andersson) lives with her quasi-husband Archie Lee (a suitably eruptive Steven J. Cambria), whose cotton ginning business is struggling, leading to the repossession of most of their furniture just before the play begins and Archie's inability to pay even for the moonshine delivered by Ruby Lightfoot (TT Jones, who shines in a small role) and young boy Two Bits (Anu Alerte). Baby Doll's Aunt Rose Comfort McCorkle (Elizabeth Ruf, whose performance leans more into the remaining dignity than the potential grotesquerie of the character), an older relative who bounces from household to household within the family, is also temporarily living (and, with varying success, cooking for) the couple. While Baby Doll goes by Archie Lee's last name and refers to herself as his wife, the marriage has not yet been consummated, as per the agreement between Archie and her deceased father. In the original text, this agreement stipulates that her father gives Baby Doll to Archie but Archie must wait until she is twenty–an age that she will reach in two days as the play opens–before they can "be man and wife in more than just name only." Shakespeare Downtown's production keeps Baby Doll's age ambiguous (for example, she cuts off another character at 9 when he is counting the birthday charms she wears on a bracelet), leading to some intriguing shifts in the play's sexual dynamics. A questionable action by Archie brings his business competitor Silva Vacarro (Juan Pablo Toro) and his partner Rock (Narky Cyriaque) to Archie and Baby Doll's home. As different characters depart for different reasons, Silva ends up left alone with Baby Doll. The results will be, to borrow Silva's own words, "highly inflammable."
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| Billie Andersson and Elizabeth Ruf. Photo by Amy Goossens |
The production evokes the Meighans' run-down environment with pieces of worn furniture, and it employs some smart solutions to the staging demands of Williams's text, such as using an old futon to stand in for an abandoned car that Baby Doll and Silva role play inside, rocking chairs for a porch swing, and the actors' placement and dialogue to establish on the flat stage the attic in which Silva locks Baby Doll. Baby Doll herself begins the show in a pale and gauzy "nightie" and ends it in the most sophisticated dress (one that she also, significantly, identifies as part of her trousseau) of her several costume changes, a symbolic counterpart to Andersson's performance of Baby Doll's increasing self-assertion. Silva compares Baby Doll more than once to cotton–she is a commodity to be possessed or traded between men: Archie, Silva, her father–but Andersson's extended pause when Silva asks her "[w]hat else did you imagine" he wanted from her (other than to implicate her husband in a crime) gives Baby Doll (more) agency in what happens after (a choice that also works in tandem with how the staging tones down some of the text's air of sexual violence).
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| Billie Andersson and Juan Pablo Toro. Photo by Amy Goossens |
Silva, unlike Fussy the hen (here played by sound effects), succeeds in entering the domestic space of Baby Doll's home (against Baby Doll's stated wishes). His entering the house, then entering the room with the crib in which Baby Doll sleeps, presents a series of penetrations, and the riding crop carried by Toro, who makes effective use of his physicality as Silva, implies not only control and power but also BDSM-shaded sexuality. Outdoor performance also creates some fortuitous moments by chance: at the performance we attended, when Toro delivered the line "birds take flight," he was able to point to actual birds taking flight.
Baby Doll confirms the rumor that Silva has heard that her and Archie's house came haunted, and in this too it reflects Baby Doll herself; she and those around her are all haunted: by her dead daddy, by poverty, by prejudice–including against darker-skinned men (like the Sicilian Silva) and their 'stealing' white women. The play's title may put one in mind of the idiom "to catch [or hold] a tiger by its tail," but it leaves open just which of the characters is–or are–such a beast. So spend some time outside with Shakespeare Downtown and decide for yourself.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
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